On an afternoon walk through a large retreat center property in Northern California, I saw an engraved wood sign to the left of the main road that read: “Mushroom Trail.” Adorable little toadstools were carved under the lettering. The sign might as well have read: “Smurfs This Way.” Without hesitation I turned off the pavement towards the Mushroom Trail.

The trail went back a hundred yards or so towards a small creek. But only a few yards in I realized this was not going to be a trip to Smurf Village. The path was not well traveled. My face hit spider web trails draped across the trail like it was crossing the finish line. Gnats swarmed in pockets of air. Some of the older trees showed evidence of having survived or being killed off by a fire. And the ground was covered with a dense layer of rotting pine needles indicating there had not been another fire since.

I stood near the creek thoroughly disappointed. There wasn’t a place to sit that wasn’t full of buggy, wet decay. And where were the stupid mushrooms? My mind threw a brief tantrum, the essential nature of which something like this: “I am on a retreat. I want special moments of peace and beauty. Where the fuck are they?” Then I remembered: Mushrooms grow from dead things.

The shift in my perspective was almost immediate. I was standing in a compost pile. And this is where mushrooms grow. What made me think I could find mushrooms without it?

Only then did I see my first mushroom. And then a few yards away I saw another. It was like once I could see the decay as useful, the decay let me see its usefulness.

I stood for a time watching the scene before me as though I were looking into a mirror. This is where I am right now. In the compost pile. And I have been angry about that. Because composting takes time—more time than I expected—and there are large pieces of who I used to be that are doing their slow work to break apart and decompose into something that will be of use one day.

Mushrooms grow from dead things. They do not metabolize sunlight like plants do. Whether they are the kind of mushrooms that are poisonous, good on pizza, or able to expand consciousness, they live and breathe in darkness and decay. They pop out of the ground like organic tombstones marking the death out of which they grew. Likewise, the poison and the goodness in me all arise from the compost of all the countless lives that have streamed through my family tree and food supply chain.

Wanting to see mushrooms without seeing the decay is an expectation rooted in a part of me deeply wired by the forces of sanitization. I grew up in a quiet California suburb with running water and working sewage, attended a church that taught that death was a “deep sleep,” and came of age in a culture where many people pay a lot of money to make their dead not look dead. I am an able-bodied, 40-year-old, white woman with American citizenship who has not, to date, struggled for access, survival, and safety. There are many blessings in this for which I am grateful and do not mean to take for granted here. But even my challenges and losses seem blessed by comparison to what others endure. For example, even though I live month to month I still do so with a level of comfort and privilege not afforded to the majority of human beings alive today.

I work as a hospice chaplain so I am not naive to death and decay. But my limited personal and direct experience with both is itself proof of my sheltered privilege. Having a mini-tantrum in the forest because I didn’t get what I wanted is also proof of that privilege. But the tender and difficult truth of simply being human ultimately exposes every privilege and protection as temporary. With enough time, there is no shelter against loss and decay. I know enough about life to know a little about this.

Knowing myself as I do, if the Mushroom Trail had been called The Path of Rot and Decay, I am certain I would have not been quite as eager to step off the main road. And in traversing the terrain of my life, this is even more true. Only with time and practice am I learning: they are the same path. There is no other path.

Exiting the Mushroom Trail, I remembered a teaching by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, how the flower is in the compost and the compost is in the flower. He writes: “Sorrow, fear, and depression are all a kind of garbage. These bits of garbage are part of real life, and we must look deeply into their nature. You can practice in order to turn these bits of garbage into flowers. It is not only your love that is organic; your hate is, too. So you should not throw anything out. All you have to do is learn how to transform your garbage into flowers.” Or mushrooms.

For me, at this time in my life, learning to transform my garbage is an exercise in learning to patiently wait alongside the compost, to lovingly let the pieces of me that need to go have time to dissolve into the ground where they can one day become the fruit of something else that will serve its purpose until it is their time, my time, to once more return to the soil.