“When people see my images, a lot of times they will say, ‘Oh my God,’” says filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg. Let’s talk about the mushroom movement and what Louie is doing for it.
“Have you ever wondered what that meant? The ‘oh’ means it caught your attention, it makes you present, it makes you mindful. The ‘my’ means it connects with something deep inside your soul, it creates a gateway for your inner voice to rise up and be heard. And God, ‘God’ is that personal journey we all want to be on, to be inspired, to feel like we are connected to a universe that celebrates life.”
When was the last time you sat back and watched something grow?
Although growth can sometimes seem imperceptible in real time, it’s happening inside us and all around us, all the time. Take mushrooms blooming in a forest, for example. The mushrooms shoot skyward by degrees and the underground mycelium that they emerge from is also growing, searching, and forming networks out of sight from human eyes.
Louie Schwartzberg is a storyteller and filmmaker who has been shooting time-lapse photography of nature, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, non-stop. His work compresses time and put you in sync with different forms of life within our interconnected world.
His work makes the invisible visible.
Louie’s photography adds scale to the growing process. It increases the viewer’s capacity to perceive time to a larger level, thereby permitting us to witness the growth of organisms like these mushrooms.
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.” So wrote the great essayist Anaïs Nin, speaking on the way humans grow. Although it’s easy to see the way this observation applies to our own lives, the same could be said of growth in all natural things.
Now that you know a little more about it, what do you think of the mushroom movement?