They're adorable, but what is up with the mushrooms?

Take a walk through the woods in the Pacific Northwest, look down, and you are bound to see a variety of mushrooms peeking through the forest floor. Above ground, each mushroom looks separate—different shapes, colors, and roles. One thrives in shade, another near fallen logs, another at the forest’s edge. On the surface, they seem independent, even unrelated. But beneath the soil, they are quietly connected by mycorrhizal networks: fine, living threads that link roots, share nutrients, carry warnings, and move resources toward places of need. A struggling tree receives support not because it asked, but because the network noticed.

Teachers, students, families, artists, organizers, businesses and elders may appear to operate in separate spaces—classrooms, kitchens, community centers, libraries. office buildings. Each brings distinct knowledge, histories, and ways of understanding the world. When that knowledge is invited into the classroom, learning becomes dynamic, connected, and relevant to student experience. What makes learning creative isn’t any single role or institution, but the connections between them: the informal conversations, shared trust, mutual care, and willingness to pass resources along when someone else is better positioned to use them.

Like mycorrhizae, these connections are often invisible and undervalued. They don’t show up neatly in test scores or lesson plans. Yet they are what allow creativity to take root—ideas cross-pollinate, new practices emerge, and learning becomes adaptive rather than rigid. A family’s lived experience strengthens a lesson. A student’s curiosity reshapes a curriculum. A community response fills a gap the system couldn’t.

In healthy ecosystems, mushrooms don’t compete for dominance; they collaborate for resilience. In healthy learning communities, education stops being something delivered from above and becomes something grown together—nourished by shared purpose, sustained by relationships, and capable of regenerating even after disruption.

The mushrooms you can see are beautiful and amazing.

But the magic is in the network underneath—quietly weaving people, ideas, and care into something stronger than any one part alone.