The Way of a Siluan
Chapter 15: Electrolyte and mycorrhizae
Years later, when Varda learned of all that happened after Eo left Hokto, Varda remembered the conversations they had during that long winter, and realized that none of her teaching was lost on the scrawny teenager with whom she shared five years of her life.
But in the meantime, as Eo passed her fifteenth birthday, they were only just coming to the tail end of Hokto's long, wet winter. Varda was putting an empty bucket under an apparently unfixable leak in the roof of the hut, and saying to Eo, "Did you change the electrolyte in the anti-gravity module of the starship yet?"
"No, I'll have to get some from the wreck," Eo said, without looking at Varda. She was standing in the doorway of the hut, trying to stay dry while angling her digital file reader so that its solar panel would catch enough light to power the unit and allow her to read.
"Then I suggest you do so," Varda said, as she watched water drip through the roof and into the bucket. "Right now," she added pointedly, when Eo showed no sign of moving.
Eo sighed. Taking one last look at the dimly-powered screen and The Sayings of Ava Shio, she turned off the digital file reader and stowed it back in Ava Yen's beige cloth bag, then headed down to the lake to get the boat.
Eo had in fact gone back and forth across the lake many times that winter, first for the hyperdrive module (which showed no problems in the scan), then for spare thermal adaptors, then for extra fusion plugs. As much as possible, Varda insisted on Eo doing this work herself, even though Varda was the more skilled in mechanics. "You never know when you'll need to depend on your own skill to get a starship moving," she told Eo once earlier that winter.
At this, Eo had scowled slightly. "I thought that Siluans stayed in one place."
"There are exceptions to every rule," Varda said sternly, "like Ava Yen."
Eo couldn't argue with that, and so off she went again and again, across the lake to the shipwreck to get spare parts and back again to Varda's starship to install them, her patience for the work wearing a little thinner each time. It wasn't just that Eo didn't like the cold metal and chemical stench of mechanics. Everything just took her so long. For a professional mechanic like Shie Baxter, scrounging electrolyte from the wreck would have taken less than two hours, including the time it takes to paddle across the lake and back. But with limited tools and limited skill, it was already noon by the time Eo had located the bolts that held the anti-gravity module in place and patiently removed them without the aid of a ratchet driver. And when she had finally extracted the anti-gravity module and drained some electrolyte into a make-shift container, it was nearly sunset.
As Eo paddled back across the lake with her container of electrolyte and walked carefully with it up the far shore to Varda's starship, she felt truly wretched. Her wrists ached from loosening bolts with a nut driver in the tight spots where the rachet handle didn't fit. Her arms were frozen to the bone after a day up against cold metal, and her hands reeked with spilled blue electrolyte. As she walked through the forest to Varda's starship, a deep sense of dissonance only made her feel worse. All around her, the great trees bearded with grey lichens and bright mosses, the tall sword-ferns, the tree-frogs creaking out their strange song, and the little brown bird hopping in the leaf litter, all were wholly grounded in the ever-present now. She alone was divided and scattered to the winds of her nattering thoughts: I want to leave here, I don't want to leave here, I don't want to do this anymore.
Too tired and discouraged to do any more that day, Eo left the makeshift container of electrolyte in Varda's starship, then walked back through the forest toward the hut, coming at the garden from the north.
North of the garden and the hut there was a clearing where a few skinny trees danced around an open space covered in fallen leaves. There, to Eo's surprise, was Varda, searching for something on the ground.
"Come and see," Varda said.
Eo walked over to find Varda brushing aside the leaf litter to reveal a pale green orb, wrapped in thin pink scales emanating from it's base. For a moment she forgot her discouragement.
"What is it?" Eo asked.
"Do you remember the tall plant with the round leaves that grew here last summer?"
"Yes, but it's dead now, isn't it?"
"Its root stays alive in the soil all winter, and as soon as the end of winter is in sight, it prepares to bloom even before it puts up leaves. This is its flower bud," Varda said, and showing Eo one of the green orbs she'd picked, she sliced it open with her knife. "See? The little flowers are waiting to bloom."
"Are we going to eat them?"
"Yes. They are bitter, but bitter is good after a long winter. Help me find a few more, and then we can eat."
Eo searched carefully for the green orbs beneath the matted leaves of last fall, feeling her energy come back to her as she touched something natural again. She had found several of the strange flowerbuds when Varda asked, "How did it go with that electrolyte? I didn't see you all day."
Eo sighed, deflated again. "I got it, eventually, but I thought it was too late to finish tonight. Tomorrow I can finish, somehow," she said, with more resignation than resolve.
"I could make it easy for you," Varda said, "but then what kind of teacher would I be?" She paused and looked pointedly at Eo, who sighed again but didn't answer or look up from the ground. Varda continued, "The problem is that you think fixing the starship is taking you away from your training, but actually it is your training. By facing what you find difficult and distasteful, you can become a true Siluan. You can learn to face everything with peace, even with joy."
"How can I enjoy something I don't want to do?" Eo asked bitterly.
"I didn't say to enjoy, I said to do so with joy; there is a difference. But try, and you will see."
"Yes," Eo said, somewhat mechanically, and Varda cringed a little, realizing she'd been talking at Eo not to her.
An uneasy silence settled between them as they continued foraging. Varda was about to speak again, when Eo stopped and gasped. "Varda, look!" she said, her voice coming to life again. "The roots of the plants are growing in this old piece of wood!"
Eo handed Varda a piece of half-rotten branch, shot through with feathery white filaments.
"They aren't roots," Varda said after a quick look, "they are mycelia. The mushrooms we see are only the fruit; the mycelia are the true body of the fungus."
"Revere the fungi, for to plants they are as the Force itself," Eo quoted.
"The Sayings of Ava Shio?" Varda asked.
"Yes, but I don't understand it," Eo said. "I thought fungi caused plant disease."
"Ava Shio was probably referring to mycorrhizae," Varda said.
"What are mycorrhizae?" Eo asked, a bit surprised at the term.
"One more thing they should have taught you in the Temple," Varda said, a little bitterly, but then shook herself and spoke more gently. "Mycorrhizae are a special class of fungi. They form associations with plant roots and help them acquire mineral nutrients in exchange for sugars from the plant."
"But then how are they like the Force?"
"From the point of view of the plant roots, the mycorrhizae surround them, they penetrate them, they bind their world together." Varda's voice became almost a chant as she adapted the ancient Jedi saying. "A whole forest can form a single network in this way, and even the trees down by the lake know that we are here foraging, because they are connected to the plants here through the mycorrhizae. For them that perception is not unlike sensing a disturbance in the Force."
Eo's face was bright again as she put out her hand, and Varda passed the branch back to her.
"You must pay careful attention to these things," Varda said. "The way of a Siluan is in the small things, or the seemingly small things, the things that are often overlooked."
Years later, Varda wondered if Eo's Force-connection with fungi began that day, but for now she simply watched Eo smell the mycelia and look at them carefully. Then scraping aside the leaf-litter, Eo put the branch back on the ground where she'd found it and covered it with leaves again.
Author's note: Truth is stranger than fiction. The plant with the green orbs is actually real; it's called fuki in Japanese, also known as Japanese butterbur. The West Coast rainforest has a similar species of the genus Petasites. We grow fuki at our farm.