The whole mushrooms are decay as an extant form of life is a sublime poetry that offers a truth. If you extrapolate that out it applies to the concept of all life as we have encountered it.
We consume other life and using an inner system of acid to dissolve the chemical bonds and a symbiotic relationship with a biome of bacterial life that we could not exist without transmute our meal into an organic slurry which we then absorb to fuel our growth and to propagate in a never ending surge of consumption.
The very rocks and minerals of our planet are eroded or transformed by time, pressure , weather. Earth herself glides the fractured scales of her skin about in an eons long process in which elements of the atmosphere are both captured and released, as the outer layers are subsumed into the mantle, fueling a spinning core that will eventually cease. This will dissipate the Van Allen belts around our world saturating the Earth with the full radioactive emissions of Sol.
Sol, the sun herself, one out of an uncountable number of stars. Each fueled by nuclear processes driven by gravity. All a furnace spewing radiation and particles out, consuming themselves as both existence and means of propagation. New stars form from the coalescing rot and remains of earlier generations.
Entropy is an ever present albeit unevenly applied force within our universe. Everything that we have been able to observe is finite. It becomes and then it dies. And in some way or another that death or decay fuels the existence of other things. The sun slowly decays which warms the earth and allows plants to use photosynthesis to grow. They are harvested and absorbed into animals that feed mushrooms with their corpses.
The most likely models show an ever expanding universe. Between the proliferation of black holes and the constantly growing distances new stars will eventually be unable to form. There will then come the inevitable heat death of the universe. No light, no concept of life, no chemical reactions. Just an amorphous blob of matter that once contained both life and energy-darkness and decay made manifest. The physical form of oblivion stretching inexorably into whatever unknown thing is beyond it. This - this state of near stasis where the temperature is uniformly such an infinitesimal fraction above absolute zero - this is how everything will be for such an incomprehensible amount of time that every moment that has ever existed from the Big Bang to now and out to the darkening of the last star would by way of comparison only be a fraction of a second to the then trillions of years to come.
Everything we know and observe and experience is the briefest of flashes of light from The Firework ™️ and we all ooh and ash from the fury of light movement and sound.
We are the children of the light - everything that exists was not created by the Big Bang. Everything was created from it. There is no appreciable difference between people, animals, plants, mushrooms, rocks, moons, stars, galaxies, photons, quarks. We are all the symbiotic forms and systems of the singularity - a moment of perfection - of infinite density. Perfection it seems cannot be sustained, and so we all exist in an effort to extend the life we are all of, like cells in a body. I think this is way we feel so good when we are shown kindness and love. It is baked into the structure of each of us, each atom remembers being part of the whole.
It is often derided as trite that we are the universe learning to love itself. And yet, if that’s not what I’m doing here, what is? These are not new ideas, versions have existed for longer than humanity has recorded. We are the same. We are one. What we do matters.
I love you all.
