"Dreaming in the Mushroom Garden of Zen" Poem

More about "Dreaming in the Mushroom Garden of Zen" Poem

Dreaming in the Mushroom Garden of Zen

The air hums—
spores drift like forgotten prayers,
soft explosions of velvet and dust,
a slow ballet of decay and birth.

The earth exhales:
umber caps swell into half-formed worlds,
their gills whispering in a language of damp and shadow,
while roots twist unseen, knitting silence into the dark.

I kneel—
my fingers graze a stem,
and the whole forest trembles:
time blurs into a watercolor of rust and gold,
the scent of loam rises like a monk’s chant,
the boundary between skin and soil dissolves.

This garden is a mind unfurling—
thoughts sprout, ghostly and transient,
some collapsing before they are fully born,
others stretching toward a light that never quite arrives.

What is it to dream here?
To be neither root nor sky,
but the space between—
a breath held too long,
a spore suspended in amber air,
a question swallowed by the mycelium’s endless net.

When I wake,
the mushrooms remain,
patient and mute.
They do not care for answers,
only the slow, inevitable work
of turning absence
into something
almost alive.