As part of our year long attunement with the mushrooms, each student is holding her own solo mushroom journeys.  This is a reflection from my self directed ceremony on my birthday in the Huron Mountains of Michigan.  

By Carrie Poe, Song of Sophia Pilgrim

The whisper and whir of the White Pine song overhead is soft but insistent.  They are time travelers taking me back to moments of intense emotion in my past.   Their song finds where these emotions are in my body and ever so gently brings them to the surface and whisks them away with their winds.  

Overhead the clouds move fast- the weather shifting dramatically from moment to moment.  Now it is sunny and warm, now it is breezy and cold, now thunder rolls in the distance.  Such are my emotions in this wild and beautiful place.  As above, so below.  As within, so without.  

I am grateful for this congruency, this communication.  I am fully met by the plants and elementals of this place and could never be alone here, or anywhere in this wild world.  The wild world is my sanctuary, my teacher, my beloved.  We are mirrors of each other.  

As I walk along, the land guides me to ripe blueberries, shows me the perfect spot to lay out my blanket, suggests a place to lay an altar.  The light flashes on a piece of broken glass making me aware so I don’t hurt myself, and a tree branch offers itself when I falter on a slippery stone.  When flies buzz around my head and I begin to catastrophize, Gaia Sophia (the land Herself) asks that I invite this fly along for the journey- and the mosquitoes, and the ants.  They are a part of the land as I am a part of the land.  

Along the way I feel tears rising and I don’t push them down, I invite them in.  I walk the leylines through the Huron Mountains, letting the tears run down my face and onto the earth, this is my perfect offering.  They are tears of longing and of gratitude.  I feel how they nourish and inform the land.  

“Thank you Mother,” I say aloud, “I trust you.  How can I invite you in even more?” Yarrow appears and makes an offering to me.   I bruise the leaves, rubbing them in my fingers to release the protective, calming scent, feeling even more held and safe.  In response I feel my body soften, my heart open even more.  This is how the land gives me the medicine I need.  This is Gaia Sophia showing me Her love.