๐๐๐๐ฆ ๐Happy Valentines Day!! ๐๐๐๐ฆ ๐
This past week I binge-listened to Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life: How Fungi Makes Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, an intoxicating read about the often hidden goings-on of fungi. From the first couple of minutes there was something romantically charged about the book. The intimate descriptions Sheldrake provides of crawling through dirt, relying on smell and touch, in search of a particular mushroom had me blushing. And it wasn't just the introduction, the whole book is filled with love. Love for science, love for creation, love for decomposition and fermentation โ small things, large things, smelly things and unknowable things. It's made me fall more in love with fungi than I already was, just in time for Valentine's Day. Luckily I don't have to worry if fungi will be mine, they don't have a choice and neither do I ๐ฅฐ
In biological taxonomy, fungi are their own kingdom, separate from plants and animals. They are commonly recognized as mushrooms, but mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of fungi. There is a lot more going on! They seem to be constantly entering relationships with other organisms. Lichen, one of the most common fungi I see, are a collaboration between different species of fungi and algae or cyanobacteria that live within their filaments in a mutualistic relationship. There is also the vast and invisible network of mycelium facilitating nutrients between plants and the environment.ย
"Plants only made it out of the water around five hundred million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of million years until plants could evolve their own. Today, more than ninety percent of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungiโfrom the Greek words for fungus (mykes) and root (rhiza)โwhich can link trees in shared networks sometimes referred to as the โwood wide web.โ This ancient association gave rise to all recognizable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of plants and fungi to form healthy relationships."ย - Entangled Life
There are a lot of things that connect us to one another that we can't see with our eyes, but we feel, literally, with our guts. You ever think about your micro-biome?1 That community of micro-organisms that live inside of us. They don't share our genetic information, but they impact how we think and behave day to day. (Kissing and sharing a living space can help those little guys travel by the way2). When I was younger micro-biome's weren't really well known or studied, so I hadn't heard about it until my early 20s โ but I was super into meditation and New Age spirituality in my teen years. I borrowed books and guided meditation CDs from the local library and sat cross-legged in my bedroom for hours. It often disappointed me. I wanted some crazy transcendental experience where I met a higher version of myself, but instead I just became very, very relaxed. I watched my mind working, spinning itself into anxious loops and patterns and then coming back to breathing โ empty, clear. You do this enough times and there's a loosening of who you are, or maybe what is "you"? Or even where are you in your body.
Learning about VR, fungi and micro-biomes similarly force me to engage with the fragility and flexibility of who and what is "me". In 2021, I studied avatar design as part of my Masters thesis in 3D animation. During my preliminary research I had a lot of assumptions about what would be necessary to accept a virtual body that were all quickly squashed. Humans need very little to accept a new body. We need synchronous hand and head tracking but beyond that there's wiggle room.3 Not only that, but our behaviour changes depending on the type of body we are in! Amazing. The feedback loop between the mind and body is part of what makes us who we are, and we can pretty easily slip into new and altered forms and become new and altered versions of ourselves. Who we become depends on who we are perceived by and who we are perceiving โ nothing means anything in a vacuum. It's an illusion that we were ever one, defined thing alone and isolated from the world. Everything we are is connected to something or someone else, and things have meaning because of those connections.
Love is more than what you have with a romantic partner; it's comprised of all those invisible tubes of care and need flowing between us. Desire, pleasure, and funโ but also pain and anger when what we love and need are threatened. I hope you feel loved today, wherever you are, and find some to give in return ๐
I can't recommend this book enough!! I also want to try foraging for mushrooms but it's a bit scary.