Monthly Archives: August 2020

World Building

Age of Aquarius

Red Mars, golden Saturn, bright Jupiter. The moon in mystical rings before the rain. All of it moving our electrons across 2500 miles and decades. Or, into Friday, 8 miles down the road. We let our nerves feel the connections. We let ourselves live on the silken bridges between.

In part we needed to re-envision kinship. Also, we needed to shift paradigms.

We did not need to start from scratch. There was a lot to read. There were friends all around Earth. Reaching into the past, to traditions resilient within, despite the toxic form of power now heavy on us. Now restricting us.

These powers were always threatening to come to our homes and disappear us, They were prone to burning us in effigy, while supposedly sheltering us.

In our studies, we came home to sharp, sweet, traditions, to past regimes of identity, in places and times on our own planet. Some had been nearly forgotten. There were things that had happened that historians had never told and stories yet to be fantasized. Some had only ever been seen on stage and in art: in a snippet of film by a visionary who had been taken from us by AIDS.

Sometimes we lacked language to describe and so, we learned languages, until we could design in tongues new to us.

It took courage to recognize and to trust what we began to know. In the beginning, I felt like a child playing imaginary games. My teacher replied, “this has always been your birth right as a human spirit.” This is what we were remembering.

You see, we were leaving, but we would return one day to Earth. In more than a millennium. We would hope to bring a better way with us when we did.  

But first, we would have to go. And so, we walked in the woods. Breathed in rain. Put bare feet on the ground. Slipped our clothes and walked into the waves, into the current of river, the stillness of lake. We savored.

The sun, we noticed, lit up our lashes, as in lazy spring days in college, lounging on a lawn with friends.

And those friends were the ones we first dreamed with. In the arrogance of youth, still shocked at what we were learning, at how much was wrong, we leaned over small tables and scones and cappuccinos, to expound. Or leaned back against the greased smooth wood of benches, to listen.

Now, we recognized the lines on each other’s faces, which were from smiling and kindness and thought. We noticed each other’s eyes. From deep in our sockets, we looked into one another and saw even the sorrows. We then saw one another as brave.

The prompt was: consider what you will need for utopia. What are the new values? Who do you look like? What are the arrangements? What doubts do you have about human capacities for freedom? Will this be answered by the limitations that come of feeling kinship with all on Earth? How do you refuse and disrupt and please and enjoy and transform within utopia?

Next, how do we get there? How do we leap the parallel tracks into the next Earth, the Earth that has healed or the unstruck Earth?

We took care about these things. We took garbage so we did not need to extract. We spent all the golden women’s pentacles on this, to churn a new wealth for the future, to feed mycelium, to build our spacecrafts.

In the tarot, The Star is a card identified with Aquarius, card of the weirdo, and the visionary. It is the card of healing, as well as of authenticity. Of reaching beyond what is. Of envisioning.

And maybe, maybe The Star represents the far sun where our multiversities would satellite while we trained for the day we, her prodigal children, will return to Earth.

We, her prodigal children, will return to Earth.

Our Planet

Mycelium Tech

In 2014, my biologist brother, Andy, sent me a speech by mushroom specialist Paul Stamets. Initially, I doubted. But by the end of the speech I was in tears of relief. Stamets showed us how fungus had cleaned up a diesel spill, as well as a chemical waste, restored ecosystems, and performed pest control. We were not alone, nor were we dependent on humankind. There was a resilient being protecting and healing Earth.

Thereafter, Andy and I joked about praying to The Great Mycelium. We hoped it would never consider us pests.

Still, Stamets warned, “we need to have a paradigm shift in our consciousness. If we don’t get our act together and come in commonality and understanding with the organisms that sustain us today, not only will we destroy those organisms, but we will destroy ourselves.”

What we lacked was consciousness of our kinship with all living beings and Earth.

In the early 1990s a close-knit group of geniuses, the Synergists, built and tested the first biosphere in the desert of Arizona. It was to be the first of many, designed with the goal of collecting data and of troubleshooting—so that one day they could create a spaceship or an extra-terrestrial colony on which to preserve life from Earth.

They traveled the globe collecting species for their mini jungle and their mini ocean, their mini forest and their mini meadow. “Do you know how many flowers it takes to feed a hummingbird?” one asked. They made a mystical home, wherein they knew every living being and felt their interconnectedness with all life.

But when they tried to to live off that land, they suffocated and starved. They went insane on carbon dioxide poisoning, fighting and spinning conspiracy theories against one another. The animals suffered needlessly. In the end, the Synergists had to bring in oxygen from outside in order to survive the full two years of their experiment.

I also heard that, without wind to make them strong, the trees fell over.

The SIA had learned two things from the Synergists. One, maintain secrecy. Two, work with the Great Mycelium.

It is now well known that the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a network of fine white filaments, called the mycelia, link into root systems of trees, plants, and other mycelial webs and transfer information and nutrition.

Perhaps the Synergists had cut their world off from this, the source of life beneath.

The intelligence of plants, laughed off by some scientists until recently, grew from the complex mind of the mycelium, which, as Stamets pointed out, grows like neurons or the nerve cells in our minds, like the dark matter of space, and like the network of the internet.

According to the research of Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia, “trees in a forest organize themselves into far-flung networks” and use the mycelium, which “connects their roots to exchange information and even goods.” Trees communicate, “convey warnings of insect attacks, and also to deliver carbon, nitrogen, and water to trees in need.”

Says Stamets, the “mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind. The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.”

Sagebrush warns its fellows of a pest intrusion.

In a 2013 article, “The Intelligent Plant,” New Yorker contributer, Michael Pollan imagined the scent of sage as an “invisible chemical chatter, including the calls of distress, going on all around.” He described the air as “powerfully aromatic, with a scent closer to aftershave than to perfume.”[‡]

A forest will even work across species to share food.

According to Simard, “fir trees were using the fungal web to trade nutrients with paper-bark birch trees over the course of the season. The evergreen species will tide over the deciduous one when it has sugars to spare, and then call in the debt later in the season. For the forest community, the value of this coöperative underground economy appears to be better over-all health, more total photosynthesis, and greater resilience in the face of disturbance.”

Western scientists were naïve to the knowledge of people 10,000 years ago or that of African, Asian, and Indigenous societies, who depended on fungi and the inventions of mycelium to preserve fire, as antibiotics, as anti-inflammatories. And much, much more.

While humans were transforming the planet with art and technology and war and pollution, the mycelium had also been at work, resolving the devastations of our time. Ask yourself what capacity the Great Mycelium has.

“Let your imagination go wild,” answers Stamets.

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With the leadership of Indigenous scientists who were also members, the SIA and the golden women had learned to work with the mycelium, to communicate a vision with the intelligence of slime molds and polypores.

The mycelium tech in my mask (and in the recycling centers we delivered garbage to and in the ones that were soon propagated on satellites twinkling in our night skies from 2025-2040) was based in this and other Traditional Ecological Knowledges kept by friends and members of SIA and put to multiple purposes by the Arks and Islands of the Multiversity.

We were remembering.

And there would be so much more to learn from fungus—about time travel for example.