What in Earth?
On navigating the liminal
“I tugged lightly on my root and felt the ground move.”
-Merlin Sheldrake
First off, there is always water, dark and murky. And there is always an understanding—some silent directive from I don’t know who or what—that I must navigate my way through the dark, murky water. And I don’t think twice; I do it despite all vagueness and fear. A run-down house with rooms marinating in the silence of their past horrors. An abandoned factory where in its basement, unheard-of operations are taking place. I have visited these places dozens and dozens of time throughout my life. Just last night, a lake-side house where from an upper-level I watched my small dog Cosmo begin to drown. I scurried down the steps, wondering is this really as fast as I can go? and exploded through the door to an outdoor dinner party where tables-for-two lined an open drain of rushing, gray water. In my dreams, I am often following the dark, sinister water into the earth. And it is these abandoned homes, factories, and places of sinister decadence that I encounter.
Yesterday, over tomato sandwiches, I asked two friends if they dream of real places in unreal ways. One of them knew exactly what I was talking about. How the brain simultaneously puts you in reality and unreality at once, using fodder from the recesses of your personal experiences to create that world that exists on the map and in your mind all at once. Coincidentally, later in the day, I followed dark water into the earth and army-crawled into the even-darker recesses of a cave. On my stomach, I submerged half my body in cave water and silt, my head grazing the cave’s lowering ceiling.
Over 20 years ago, I rode my bike along a familiar, dirt path. The path followed the Allegheny River—a river that I claim as my own artery. One day, like in a dream, I felt a vague directive to get off my bike and meander into the woods. So I did. I walked into the woods and up an embankment where I eventually came into contact with a hole in the earth. I peered down into the gaping, hillside slit, feeling the cool air emitted from it. And my apologies to all mothers out there, but I got on my stomach and shimmied into it feet-first, a reverse birth, watching the hole of daylight and its canopy of trees get smaller until I couldn’t lift my head enough to look any longer.
I feel like I’m crawling out of the primordial swamp, I said to my friend Jody yesterday as I crawled out of cave water to where I was eventually able to stand on my feet. At that point, I was the farthest I had ever gone in that cave. My bare knees stung from crawling on my hands and knees over rocks. We started off as a group of six that dwindled down to four due to personal comfort preferences. The four of us, bipedal again, stared up at the cave ceiling as if we were standing inside an expanded, textured lung. What looked like draperies of flesh was limestone and calcification. Some parts of the ceiling had organic debris lodged in the crevices, an indicator of having been flooded to the ceiling. I then had a flashback to the briefest paralysis of panic I felt when army crawling through the earth just minutes ago. I had imagined the small space I occupied filling with an unexpected torrent of water. Being a pro at panic attacks, the paralysis had subsided with my well-practiced mind tricks.
All of us adorning head lamps, we illuminated the limestone cathedral and marveled at its decadence. The ceiling, lung-like and gill-like, had me mindful of my own breathing apparatuses. The expanding and retracting sacks adjacent to my heart. The swell of my diaphragm. The way air catches in the throat. The way I hold balls of air in my mouth and move them around my gums and lips. How those balls of air chortle as they break down into smaller balls of air. And there I was, a little human inside a ball of air within the cave’s body.
What on earth, I heard Jody say as she pointed her light at something on the cave’s drooping ceiling. I think you mean what in earth? I said to Jody. Her light shone on little strands of what looked like hair. As if someone’s head of short hair grazed the ceiling. This reminds me of something I saw a long time ago, I told her.
Eventually, I was able to crouch on my feet and uncurl the line of my body after descending, alone, feet-first into the slit in the earth. Very little light entered into the earth from where I deposited myself. I turned on my pale pocket flashlight. In twenty-ish years hindsight, I wish I could remember what I pointed the light at first. What we direct the light at, I want to believe, teaches us what we value or fear the most. I believe I might have pointed it into the deeper part of the earth, the opposite from which I came. What I saw there was a hall into darkness, its ceiling lined with wooden beams.
An abandoned mineshaft.
I walked into the hall and into a room that led to two narrower, drooping halls that appeared impassable. I turned around and went back to the first room, my mind swimming with catastrophe. Eventually, the beam of my pale flashlight caught something white and filamental on the mineshaft’s floor. I inspected it closely, likening it not to cellophane, not to hair, but something ethereal that I had never seen before. As if a spider’s web was something that wasn’t spun but grown from the ground in a free-form tangle of gossamer. It rose from the floor like a macabre plant, a tendril reaching upward toward me. And again like in a dream, I felt directed to touch it. So I did.
Go ahead and touch it, I told Jody, eager to see what would happen. So she did. Nothing happened. The thin strand simply dangled as usual. As we moved further into the world, I wondered about the gossamer ghost I encountered in the mine shaft over twenty years ago. I began to gaslight myself. You didn’t see what you think you saw back then. What you saw happen didn’t actually happen. If you saw it today, it would be something you could identify and all the magical realism of it would dissipate. You didn’t see anything miraculous. Time and your poor memory have turned it into something dream-like. Something that isn’t actually real.
My geology-wise friend Steve and his friend Robert played detective with various rocks on the cave’s floor. Talk about layers and time passing rendered us humans as mere little dreams in the cave’s subconscious. Mere insignificant blips in the cave’s record of time. We were four beams of light, cross-sectioning the bowels, each beam of light an indicator of yearning. Other indicators of yearning were the two frogs at the first sump, hopping along the margins of the cave. And between Jody’s feet, a salamander who looked at the world through wide, dark eyes.
Eventually, Jody’s beacon aimed at yet another drooping formation and she beckoned me over. More ethereal hairs expanded over the surface of the stone, spreading its tendrils—like little hands—and maneuvering over grooves and divots. Mycelium, we agreed. In my mind, I thought how interesting because usually it’s hidden beneath the ground and then I realized: you are underneath the ground, silly.
The first sump—about 900 feet into the cave—was where we turned around, unable to safely go further. On the way back, we agreed to turn off our lamps and stand quietly as a circle in the darkness. I felt no difference between opening and closing my eyes. Dream-like, I felt unmapped yet anchored in a liminal space accompanied by the sound of moving, dark water. The moving water reflected nothing. The undulating formations surrounding us were no different from the negative space surrounding them. I rotated head in various directions, seeing nothing. I thought of the patented color Vantablack, a color created by carbon nanotubes that absorb all light, making everything covered in it appear like a black void in space. Then I thought about the anechoic chamber in Minneapolis, the quietest room in the world where people pay to see how long they can stay in the room with the sound of their own aliveness. Next, I thought about the people with me and how this was likely a spiritual experience for them, too. These are the people who marvel and exhilarate in the earth. People who smell like sweat and have mud in their laugh lines. We stood in silence for what felt like a long time but there was no way to tell and in hindsight it seems silly to say long time when speaking about the inside of the earth where time’s narrative is scripted on the walls in various languages. Eventually, my eyes adjusted slightly and I felt that I was able to see the ceiling and the farther wall, yet not Robert who stood closest to me. Eventually we did turn on our lights and I was shocked to find Robert sitting criss-crossed on the ground. Other than the slightest shift of a foot, I didn’t hear him sit down.
Heading back to the maw of the cave, we used our UV lights. Steve marinated parts of the cave’s wall in a beam of light and quickly shut it off, showing off the wall’s eerie bioluminescence. A reishi-like mushroom grew on some wood at the log jam and also glowed blue and yellow. Robert had rushed ahead of us as we dillied and dallied. When I got close to the entrance, I couldn’t tell if a silhouette at the mouth of the cave was him or rock.
Riding my bike back home from my brief, trance-like trip into the earth, I couldn’t wrap my head around what I saw in the mineshaft. The Allegheny River slowly slithering southward to my right, I wondered how I miraculously walked directly to a hole in the earth along that 5-mile stretch of dirt path. And how when I touched that gossamer, ghost-like plant, it shriveled away from me into nothingness as if someone hit a rewind button. To this day, I can’t quite see the phenomenon in my mind’s eye. Was it less of a rewinding and more of a trick in the lighting? Is my imagination taking liberties?
I have never been able to give the eerie thing a name. And how odd and silly that despite all my reading, research, and forest-play, I have never named it mycelium. Mycelium, its hyphae made of filaments composed of substances like protein and chitin. Mycelium, the entangled web of interconnectedness underneath the ground that allows for plants and trees to thrive and communicate. As others say, the wood wide web.
As my friend finished eating her tomato sandwich at my place yesterday, we talked about how animals are tapped into something—dare I say sacred—that humans do not understand. And later in the evening over a lovely dinner at Jody’s, I finished that thought. How no matter what humans study and to what degree, it is only from the human perspective. Other ways of living and existing can only be known through how humans perceive. How a starling sees other starlings is how humans see how starlings see other starlings. It’s the observer’s paradox at play. We can only observe and explain how we observe and explain.
I am taken back to a portion of yesterday’s cave walls where we noticed an interesting pattern, like a script all along the surface. A long, chaotic narrative that undoubtedly has a scientific reason for being there. And it’s beautiful, isn’t it? Our eight eyes, four brains, and four beams of light reckoning with time in rock form. How, because of language, our senses, and our own filamental narratives, our thoughts unravel from us like the finest gossamer to touch the earth.
So many beautiful lines in this. Some of your best writing! And it’s so wonderful to know other people think the same thoughts about animal perception and experience and how humans are so human-centric all the time rarely considering that animals even have a perspective at all. Just the very best writing 💕💥
I agree with Monica - superb writing, weaving together two other-worldly and BRAVE experiences!