If you are familiar with my art, you know mushrooms and lichen and beetles often show up in my work. They are symbols for positive change. In nature, they are the responsible for breaking down the deadwood of the forest and ameliorating the soil microclimate so seeds can sprout and grow new living things. I find them fascinating and beautiful.

I live on a bit of land where I am able to watch this process and it’s really fascinating. Yes, my little woodland space may look scruffy to outsiders who probably think I should mow and hack and rake and spray herbicides and haul my brush away, but I rarely do any of those things. I may mow a path or pull weeds and vines off of my house and I do clear fallen branches off the paths but I always leave them in the woods to rot. I have been watching fallen trees that we cut up to clear the road decompose for years and the process is amazing and beautiful. Lichens, fungi, slime molds, moss and resurrection ferns thrive in my woods. So do beetles and worms. There is so much life where the deadwood falls. What looks like garbage to my tidy neighbor with the tidy green lawn is the lifeblood of my wooded home–and our planet.

A few summers ago, we had a problem with our plumbing and had to call out a plumber to remove roots from our sewer line. He was a young man used to working in more urban environments and he was a little freaked out by my woods. He asked why I would want to live in a place like this with trees and meadows all around my house. He said the dark little part of my yard that leads down toward the creek was giving him Walking Dead zombie vibes. He was rude and trying to provoke me. I didn’t not appreciate his bad manners but I liked that my woods with the mushroom covered logs and cawing crows overhead made him squirm. I am such a cranky old witch. Ha!

Admittedly, the back part of my property is a little wild. It is overgrown and thickety. It is on a floodplain and large trees that have fallen and been relocated during flash floods have landed there. The flash flooding seems to be getting worse. The storms are more violent and the trees are uprooted upstream and then tear through the waterway, clawing at the edges of the tributaries, changing the landscape and doing more damage by knocking down other trees and encouraging erosion. Poor management of these urban waterways by humans also causes problems. They dredge and cut down trees and cause erosion and the build up of rock and silt that they leave sitting at the water’s edge after clearing areas and widening passages of the creek, foolishly believing it will prevent more flooding, just makes a horrible mess farther downstream when the water carries it away –and it kills wildlife. It’s a reckless and lazy way of “managing” a living waterway and their mistakes all end up in the form of mountains of silt and fallen trees at the bend of the creek behind my home.

Some of the trees that have tumbled into my wild acres are massive and I have been walking across them like bridges for 2 decades. Other trees have washed to the edges of the waterway and started to rot. It looks like giants have been playing pick up sticks and thrown the trees down in a pile for their game. Sometimes new storms bring new trees and they slam into the old ones and dislodge them and the entire landscape changes again. It’s like the giants were playing their games while I slept.

Most people wouldn’t want to live in a place like this, I suppose, but I like the proximity to the water and my house is far away from the chaos so I just let things happen down there and I watch. It is fascinating and sometimes ugly and oftentimes beautiful–but not in the way you’d think. My plumber certainly didn’t see any beauty there. He just kept looking over his shoulder, expecting snakes and creepy crawlies–and obviously zombies to crawl out of the giant’s woodpile to get him. I kind of loved that. I kind of really love that I live in a place like this like some funny little old witch in the woods with a gnarly old fallen tree fence and bone gate in the woods. I love that in my weird little corner of the world, habitats are allowed to thrive and the denizens of the deadwood world are doing something to which most humans, obsessed with lawns and tidy edges are oblivious.

Last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I was thinking about that stupid plumber looking for zombies in my woods. I started thinking about zombies as metaphors for our destructive human nature. Zombies are manifestations of our guilt and capitalist hungers and fear of the other. I remembered a scene from one of the first Walking Dead episodes that I watched. The human travelers were walking through a wooded area and somehow stirred up a nest of zombies and several skeletal forms emerged from the forest floor all covered in moss and turkey tail mushrooms. I was already making my Lichen Sister sculptures which were female figures covered with lichens and mosses and beetles and seeing that lurching zombie covered with all of that lovely fungi and miss excited me. I started wondering how long it would take for the fungi to completely decompose the undead. Could it?

When I make my sculptures of madonnas and children covered with fungi and lichens and beetles I am imaging a sort of healing. We humans have made such a mess of things. We are like the destructive zombies just lurching along, driven by hunger. I can’t help but wonder how the planet will fare when we have all gobbled each other up with our greed and hate. I wonder how long it will take to erase us completely and cover up our bones with beautiful fungi. We are the zombie rot, I’m afraid.

So, all of this wondering and pondering is me trying to braid together my fascination with the life force of deadwood and the regenerative processes of fungi and my work of cleaning up my little stretch of a waterway and the endless work I do to understand the human race. You may not be able to see it yet. I am not sure I do either but there is a connection between the zombie rot and the fungi and my counter spell assemblage work. It’s about acknowledgement of destructive forces in humans and how we are like bad storms and disease on this planet. It’s about how, despite our arrogance and ignorance and our need to see ourselves as separate and above the natural world, we are most certainly not and our place in that story isn’t very pretty. We are destroyers and consumers. I am trying to find something positive in that analogy. The best I can do right now in a time when I am pretty unhappy and ashamed with us humans is that maybe, somehow, we are part of a regenerative process like stag beetles and fungi. I am trying to find reclamation, healing and restoration. It would be nice if we showed remorse and could apologize but maybe the planet doesn’t need that. Maybe we are just another chapter in its story. We will destroy and break things down to the point that we can’t survive here anymore but the planet will morph into something new and different.

And no, I am not going to write about the obvious comparison to the smash and rebuild nonsense that this administration and the tech world parasite that has attached itself to our government are eschewing right now except to say that they are definitely speeding up the process of our demise.