Mycelium

As I type this I am flying, 30,000 feet above ground and 1,000 miles per hour, above an undulating, pulsating, flickering cumulonimbus cloud. The thunderhead is one in a string of dozens that stretch over the country for miles, in a front that is one of hundreds that will form and dissipate as they sweep across the great plains over the course of the summer storm season. Despite their regularity and predictability, each individual storm commands an overwhelming sense of respect and awe. The unmistakable sound of distant thunder sends a universal message: take cover. Something is coming.

A storm is hungry: it gobbles rising warm air from the heat of the earth and belches out cold winds. It digests humidity and expels whole droplets of liquid water—millions of droplets per second—in great bursts back to the ground. The friction of this molecular chaos causes unimaginably powerful strikes of pure electricity, which flash so hot and quick they leave behind actual vacuums of atmosphere; the air itself claps back together to create incredible sound.

All of these elements, as greedy as they seem, rejuvenate the land upon which they torment. Rains rehydrate soil and replenish water tables, lightning purges dry underbrush making way for new growth, and wind clears dead branches and leaves from struggling trees. It is a shampoo and conditioning treatment that the earth craves. It is a mutually beneficial agreement.

Like storms, like education, like mycelium structures, art should nourish. It should give as much as it takes, it should open eyes and doors, and it should leave its viewers with more than they arrived. It should digest. Like institutions and sugarcane and billionaires and leeches, art that takes without giving leaves nothing but lifeless drought in its path. Be mycelium.