Every Year, Right on Time

What a forest floor taught me about the work nobody sees

Amanita muscaria mushrooms in three stages of growth at the base of a silver birch tree at Sandbeck, Tasmania. The largest cap is a vivid red-orange with white spots, two smaller mushrooms emerge from the leaf litter beside it.

Every year, right on time, reliable as always, the mushrooms come back.

They grow at the base of the birch trees here at Sandbeck. The same spot. The same season. And every time I see them, I stop.

Not because they are unusual. Because they are not.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the things in nature that just show up. Year after year. Without fanfare, without needing anyone to notice. The mushrooms. The wattle bird returning to the same grevillea every spring. The particular quality of light in late April. The things that hold, even when everything else feels like it is shifting.

In my work, I sit with people in the parts of their lives that feel the least reliable. The relationship that ended. The version of themselves they thought they would be by now. The sense that something fundamental has come loose.

One of the things people in distress often describe is a loss of predictability. When the ground feels uncertain, everything costs more. More vigilance. More effort just to get through the day. What I know from both clinical research and four decades of lived experience is that the nervous system is constantly scanning for safety. For anchors. For the things it can count on.

Which is why I keep coming back to those mushrooms.

Here is something extraordinary about fungi. Beneath the surface, they form vast underground networks called mycelium. These networks connect trees and plants across huge distances, passing nutrients, water, and chemical signals between them. Scientists call it the Wood Wide Web. What looks like a handful of mushrooms at the base of a tree is actually the visible tip of something much larger, something that has been quietly working for months, sometimes years, before it ever breaks the surface.

That is the kind of science that takes your breath away when you sit with it long enough.

So much of what happens in therapy looks like nothing from the outside. The session where someone finally says the thing they have been carrying for a decade. The morning they get out of bed and it is just slightly less hard than the morning before. The slow, quiet renegotiation of what a person believes about themselves and what they deserve. None of it looks dramatic. A lot of it looks like nothing at all.

But it is all mycelium. Underground work that will, in its own time, break the surface.

One of the most painful parts of struggling with mental health is the feeling that nothing is happening. That the effort is not producing anything visible. That everyone else seems to be growing and you are just here. At the base of the tree. In the dark.

What the forest knows, and what I have had the privilege of witnessing in my work, is that this is almost never true. Growth that cannot be seen is still growth. Connection that cannot be measured is still connection. The quiet, underground, invisible work you are doing right now is often the most important work you will ever do.

The mushrooms do not rush. They do not apologise for being small. They do not compare themselves to the tree. They just show up, every year, right on time, doing exactly what they are meant to do.

If you are in an underground season right now, if the growth feels invisible and the effort feels thankless, know that this is a normal and necessary part of the process. You are not behind. You are not broken. You are doing the work that eventually, reliably, breaks the surface.

And if you are looking for a small act of grounding this week, find the thing in your world that shows up every year without fail. The tree. The bird. The particular light. Let it remind you that some things hold.

That is enough. That is actually everything.

Amanda Baker is a counsellor and the founder of Able Stables, a nature-based therapy practice in Tasmania that bridges evidence-led clinical science with the restorative power of the natural world. If you are ready to find your steady ground, she would love to hear from you. Book a Discovery Call at ablestables.com.au