THE RED MYCELIUM

AI Rendering/Mixed Media
2025
Edition of 10

A Story of Protection, Transformation, and Deep Listening

…كان يا مكان في قديم الزمان
…a woman who had never known what it felt like to have someone truly at her back. She moved through the world with an open front body but an exposed back body, untouched, unguarded, and unseen.

One night, in the quiet space between intimacy and fear, she felt a hand on her back. A tender caress. It should have been safe. It looked safe. But deep inside her, something tensed. Her kidneys popped a warning, her adrenals screamed with fear. And in that moment, just beyond the edge of consciousness, she saw it—a towering, vivid red tree, burning bright against the mountainous background. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced, it was strong, commanding, and unmissable.

At first, she thought it was a sign of protection, something standing tall between her and the unknown. But as she continued to listen, with her body, something shifted. The tree began to breathe. Its form wavered, and softened. It did not rise in singular defiance; instead, it spread outward, wide, and downward, deep into the unseen world beneath her.

The red tree became a ginkgo leaf shape, its body woven from vast, visible networks of mycelium, a living web, ancient and wise, connecting her to everything beneath the surface. It was no longer just a symbol of strength but of interconnectedness, of an ecosystem quietly working beneath awareness, breaking down the old, making way for the new. For repair.

And as she stood within this vision, her heart began to ask: was the hand on her back a warning? Was this a signal of danger, or was this something else? The red mycelium did not scream run, it pulsed with something quieter, deeper. It did not command to retreat, it was an invitation to witness. Perhaps it was not about the hand. Perhaps it was about the stories her body still carried, the places within her that had never known how to relax into being held.

She realized then that the fear was not about the present moment. It was the echo of everything before it. The touch had not caused the discomfort, it had simply illuminated what was already there. The hand was not the source of her unease, nor was it the solution. It was a doorway, one she had unknowingly stepped through, and into the depths of her own unfolding.

If there was a warning here, it was not against the hand. It was against silence. Against bypassing. Against pushing past what her body was asking her to see. The red mycelium did not arise to tell her to leave, it arose to teach her how to stay, not in the arms of another, but with herself. To not just survive the sensation, but to let it speak. To trust that her body was not trying to frighten her, but to guide her.

Healing, she understood now, was not always about fighting external threats. Sometimes it it’s about standing still with the ones within.

And as the vision started to soft away, she realized something else: protection is not always a fortress. Sometimes, it is a slow, quiet unfolding across a period of time.

She had spent a decade believing safety meant armor, walls, impenetrable strength. But this vision, this living red mycelium, was telling her otherwise. Protection could be fluid. It could be adaptive. It could be about filtering rather than blocking, metabolizing rather than resisting. Like mycelium does, she was learning to break down old fears and transform them into something nourishing, something that could sustain her.

This is not just a vision. This is not just a ginkgo-shaped tree.

It’s her body learning to listen. It’s her shifting from survival into trust. It’s the unseen networks of her own resilience waking up. And just as mycelium turns decay into new life, she realizes that her past, her patterns, her wounds—they are not things to be buried or erased. They are meant to be transformed, composted into wisdom, and integrated into connection.

She is no longer alone in the unseen. The red mycelium has her back. And this time, she can feel it.

Artist’s Note:
This piece is a reflection on the body’s hidden intelligence—how we carry the memory of what we have never received and how healing does not always arrive as we expect it to. The image of the red mycelium emerged in a moment of deep somatic truth, revealing that protection is not only about boundaries but about connection, transformation, and trust in the unseen forces that hold us.