The Amateur Mycologist's Garden: On Cultivating a Reading Practice for Surprise and Symbiosis

We often approach our reading with the focused intensity of a carpenter. We want a tool that fits the hand, a blueprint to follow, a pile of raw material to be shaped into a useful final product. Our feeds are lumber yards, our note-taking apps are toolboxes, and our goal is to build a sturdy structure of knowledge. This is a valid and powerful approach. But it is not the only one, and its singular pursuit can leave us blind to a different kind of value, one that is less about construction and more about cultivation.

I’ve been thinking about the amateur mycologist, the weekend wanderer whose eye is trained for a particular kind of surprise. They don’t march into the forest with a shopping list, expecting to find specific specimens in neat, predictable rows. Instead, they understand the conditions—the damp, decaying log; the特定symbiosis between certain trees and fungi; the season’s first cool rains. They create the possibility for a find by understanding the environment, not by demanding one.

What if we gardened our reading habits with a similar mindset? Instead of treating our feeds solely as pipelines for targeted information, we could tend to them like a mycologist tends a woodland floor. This means intentionally planting “spores” of the unexpected. It means subscribing to a newsletter just outside our expertise, following a writer whose conclusions we often disagree with, or deliberately clicking on a link that seems to lead nowhere. We are not consuming this content for immediate utility, but to create a rich, organic substrate in which unexpected connections might fruit.

The goal shifts from efficient harvesting to fostering a healthy ecosystem of thought. The mycologist knows that the most fascinating growth often happens out of sight, in the vast, hidden mycelial network beneath the soil. Our own “digital mycelium” is the web of half-formed notes, forgotten bookmarks, and seemingly tangential reads that we allow to accumulate without immediate pressure to organize or “use.” We trust that decomposition—the breaking down of old ideas—is as valuable as the accumulation of new ones. It is in this dark, fertile humus that the most surprising insights can suddenly push through to the surface.

This practice requires a different kind of note-taking. It’s less about filing and more about sporing. Instead of meticulously tagging a quote for future retrieval, we might simply jot down a fleeting impression, a question it raises, or a single resonant phrase, then leave it be. We are scattering spores, not building a cabinet. The connections between these scattered notes are not forced by a rigid taxonomy, but are allowed to form organically, sometimes years later, when the conditions are right.

Such a system is, by its nature, messy and unpredictable. It will never provide the clean satisfaction of a perfectly indexed database. But it offers a different reward: the thrill of the find. The joy of stumbling upon a connection between a line of poetry saved in 2019 and a scientific paper read last week is the intellectual equivalent of discovering a magnificent, rare mushroom exactly where you weren’t looking for it. It is a reminder that our minds, and the gardens we cultivate for them, are living systems, teeming with latent life, waiting only for the right conditions to bear fruit.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: