Golden Teacher Mushroom: My Trip Journey

“The Hollow Root”

It started quietly, the way old rivers slip into underground caverns without a ripple.

Isaac sat alone in the woods behind his grandfather’s house, the pale autumn light filtering through bare branches. In his palm, six dried Golden Teacher mushrooms. Golden, not just in name they shimmered faintly, almost metallic, as if dusted with memories.

He chewed slowly. The taste was earth, old pages, rusted metal. Swallowed.

And waited.

The forest breathed.

The first shift came with the wind. It moved not through the trees but around them, in tight spirals of color. He blinked was that a pulse? The bark on a nearby birch seemed to expand, contract. He laughed. Then stopped.

Laughter had a sound he hadn’t heard before, like a zipper made of light.

He stood up, or thought he did. The ground did not seem to mind whether he stayed or left it rolled beneath his feet like the back of some massive, sleeping animal. Moss curled gently at the edges like it was trying to speak.

He wandered.

The woods warped into cathedral spires. Tree trunks stretched impossibly high, then looped into arches of impossible symmetry. Leaves shimmered with impossible colors colors that had no names, only feelings.

Time, too, let go. He was no longer twenty-nine. He was four. He was ninety. He was his grandfather, and then he was the mushroom.

He knelt beside a rotting log. Mycelium veins ran across it like silver frost. Something tugged at his gut no, not fear. Recognition.

A memory? No a lesson.

He closed his eyes.

In the dark, a vision: a vast underground web, silent and alive, humming with ancient purpose. It pulsed in time with his own heartbeat. He was inside it. Of it. The mycelium whispered not in words but in patterns a braid of death and rebirth, of decay that sang with life.

He saw cities built on forgotten soil. Bones wrapped in fungal lace. Lovers kissing under fluorescent lights while spores drifted through the air unnoticed. He saw his own hands turning to roots.

And then, he was falling but upward. The sky bent inward and swallowed him whole.

He woke up as if breaking the surface of a still lake.

Night had fallen. The fireflies blinked in and out like punctuation in the dark.

His face was wet with tears.

He didn’t remember crying.

He looked at his hands. Still flesh. Still his. But they trembled with some new understanding an ancient knowing that had crept into him through the hollow root of his own being.

He laughed again, softly this time, and it didn’t sound like a zipper anymore.

It sounded like home.