It rained for nine days. By the end of it the path through the wood was a slow, dark soup of leaf and water, and the air smelled like the inside of an old book.
We are taught to flinch from decay. We bag it, bury it, cover it with mulch and call the work done. The forest does not flinch. The forest eats its dead and grows the next year from them.
The Open Grave — the tenth Moon Glyph — is the season the Spore Oracle gives to this work. Not as punishment. Not as morbidity. As participation. The leaf does not fail by falling. It enters a longer body.
There are losses in a year that behave the same way. A job that ended. A version of yourself that no longer fits. A belief that quietly composted while you weren't looking. The Open Grave asks: what is this becoming, beneath the surface, that I cannot yet see?
The mushroom is the visible part. Most of the work is invisible.
On the tenth day the rain stopped. The path was still soup. But when I knelt at the edge of it, I could see the white threads of mycelium running through the rot like a slow, thoughtful sentence. The forest had already started writing the next year.