Kabute

It was half a decade ago when something died. A foul smell led you to the garden, and horror clicked in softly—like a distant memory returning without a name. There, on the ground, was something decaying. Surely there was, but certainly neither a life nor a body—not bound to be discovered by flesh-bound sight. Not even your nose brought you there, because it was never superficial. It was a death you hardly noticed. Still something stood in that quiet ruin. Small. Pale. Neither flower nor weed. It didn’t belong to the kingdom Plantae, nor to the Animalia. Mycologically, it had a kingdom of its own. And yet—it breathed. It bled. It felt almost alive.[1.1]

A mushroom. Indeed, it was what brought you there.

Not planted. Not invited. It bloomed from the dark and appeared without warning. For most, a superstition—an omen of bad luck. To the common eye, a parasite. To the desperate, perhaps a poison. To the wild, a feast. And to science, a decomposer.

But what if it was, after all, a tonic—just as mildly sweet as chamomile tea? Just like how those fungal frequencies, once bio-sonified, hum into ambient synth notes that fill the air exactly when the silence becomes too sharp to bear.

And although mushrooms are seasonal, they do not wait for spring, nor bask in summer’s heat, nor long for the kiss of winter’s snow upon their tiny little umbrellas. They play in the fall, though—when colors seem to be swallowed by the Earth’s undertone. They rise not from thriving things, but from rot. From the damp. From the places no one celebrates. They come not from the particular moment when something lived, but when something ended. They grow where something else almost drowned in quicksand. And in that soft collapse, they arrive—to do what nothing else can: to turn the forgotten into something that can feed again. To return what was lost as something worth beginning from. It comes to sit with you in the damp. To grow beside the ache. To remind you that even in the most unlikely places, things still find a way.

It’s the same with the living. We die in ways we don’t talk about. Not physically. Not dramatically. But slowly—everyday deaths, quiet and cumulative. And we only realize it when a random turning point sets in. Until one day, something unfamiliar grows beside us. Uninvited. Unannounced. Strange in shape. All it does is cry, but in that cry is a presence. And suddenly, it dawns on you—that first shift in the air, the precise moment the rot turns to soil, ready to color your garden again.

This mushroom—it doesn’t signify death, and this prose is no elegy. It is a piece of renewal. A strange, soft signal that something else can begin. That something inside you, no matter how ruined, can still feed something new. At some point, you were no longer alone in the dark. The monochromes and mud palette had washed away—now turning softly into pastels.

Something will always come. Something unexpected. Something unexplainable. Something that shifts the air—quietly—but never your purpose. A reminder that no matter how much of you has withered, there’s still a part that remembers how to grow. Until one day, the scent of blossoms returns to the garden, not in place of the mushroom, but beside it.

And you remember what it means to begin again. To hold on, and perhaps this time, it’ll linger longer. Or an infinity beyond. Surely it will. With the mushroom still there—intact, unwavering, a quiet witness of you in process.