Look closer.
We were out for a walk in the woods by our house this weekend. No, not foraging, but definitely collecting…our little likes to look for cool leaves and bark and rocks and things.
Out of the blue he shouts, “look daddy! Mushrooms!” (he knows not to eat them, so no worries there).
I leaned in for a look and snapped a photo. “Wow, those are cool!” I said. “They look like a stack of pancakes.”
“No daddy…” he said. “Look closer.”
I crouched down lower and moved in for a better look. There, tucked quietly in the back, under a fern and among the cedar twigs and carpet moss, was a cluster of even tinier bright white mushrooms.
It’s easy to miss the tinier things hidden in a world of wonder. There’s so much bigness happening around us all the time. And yet, to the nematodes that feed them, these mushrooms would seem gargantuan…something our size would be unfathomably vast in their perspective.
Here we are, stomping and clomping our way around the woods, always looking up, trying to see big things. And all the while, tiny mushrooms are tucked away, living immense lives, turning trees into soil so other trees can grow.
Without these tinier things, and things tinier still, big things would never have come into being. We would not be here.
Sometimes, it takes a thing a little smaller than us to remind us big things to crouch down and see what’s there, underneath it all.
Look closer.