When I was young, I never thought of going "mushroom hunting". I would notice the occasional fungus while playing baseball, or while hiking. But I never knew there were people that actually took trips to the wild in search of certain mushrooms. Well that was until I was about 16 years old when one of my friends called me up in excitement that he had found someone with mushrooms. I wasn't into psychedelics as a young adult, I already thought weed was the devils drug when I was a kid; and shrooms seemed absolutely horrible; but at the same time I wasn't against people who chose to. So I laughed and asked him a few questions about them. Turns out, the provider had picked these mushrooms themselves. I don't know about you, but that interested the deepest part of my mind. What else is out there? Drugs grow right out of the ground? How can this be real... So I set out to find every bit of information on wild mushrooms in my state. At the age of 16, me and my friend both found our first wild magic mushrooms. They were nestled back in a public park right off the Puget sound. One...two...three mushrooms were found. We giggled in excitement as we realized we had just found one of the most sought after species of mushrooms. This was just the beginning though, as that friendship was lost because of something as simple as drugs. In my mind, mushrooms themselves meant more to me than revealing where I had found my next patches; even if it meant losing friends.
Nowadays I go mushroom hunting as a way to get fresh air and cleanse my mind of all that society has put in it. I can do what I want in the forest, its my domain, my clean slate, my one and only hobby that I can teach myself and be taught by the mushrooms at the same time. Nobody else can tell me "how" to mushroom hunt, there's no certain way of "how" to, it's just instinct and pure luck mixed with educated guesses based on habitats and indicators. Mushrooms have a way of speaking by nature. And nature is serene.
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