Monthly Archives: June 2022

Practical Details

Space Travel

At times over the years, I would jolt awake, alert with some practical question. How would we grow food? How many would we be in a 5-mile diameter ship?

How, in our limited bodies and lifespans, to travel so far and stay away so long?

There were many projects in the Multiversity, which was a lab for utopias, a fleet of arks to preserve earth’s ecosystems, and a grand collaboration, a network of ocean currents, weather, and migration paths, most of which we had given to the Mycelium to work out.

Among the many projects, there were cryo-travelers, who would awaken in one thousand years having slept through the millennium of our retreat from Earth.

Some argued that we needed to be awake, to live, to die, to try, fail, learn, discover and create across generations of travelers. Our bodies were needed for these projects. When our lives ended, knowledge could be passed on as it always had been.

Somehow, with the set of common values, disciplines, and ethics we had built within SIA, we could build new constructs that would vanquish the old isms and institute new arrangements of power.

Old ones too. Some projects were built upon recreating lost knowledges, understandings of nature and power that had long been labelled “occult.”

When I was a teacher on earth, my students would quote an old truism that I believed to be false: we study the past in order to not repeat it, they said.

However, when climate change threatened, some turned to traditional Indigenous knowledges in hopes that those ancient projects might save Earth. They studied the past to remember how, to repeat ways of living in relationship with the planet that had been lost.

My brother Andy was involved in such a project, with our friend Amoret, on a Western European Ark with a druidic, celtic, wiccan vision.

I looked forward to visiting.

With the weather and the ocean currents and the migration paths of birds, we would move through the Multiversity by shuttle, exchanging and visiting one another’s projects, challenging one another, learning new ideas.

The original visioners, like Juno, and the Mycelium knew that the cryo-travelers would not miss out either. And in death, the rest of us would join these “Dreamers,” who slept knit into the collective unconscious, into all of time, into all of the projects, in the Otherworld some of us visited in meditations or in shamanic journeying or in our nightly rest.

The Mycelium would facilitate our remembering.

2029. As we buckled into our shuttle on that dark winter day. I looked around at these long-held friends.

Fourteen of us, some of whom you will come to know well.

I looked to the empty seat where Camilla would have been. Beside it, Gallia, whose face was filled with sorrow and, as ever, heroic excitement.

Manny gets it, her Ludmilla long gone. Xan seeing the future, unable to show us, is missing my brother, Andarto, already on his ark with Amoret, a friend to Britomartis who buckles in across from me, her dark hair gone grey, her blue eyes still impossibly blue.

Cly and the other team too.

As for me, Juno is beside me, my teacher. Dido is here. I am sitting at the right side of her. As always, she knows, puts a warm hand to my shoulder and leans forward to turn towards me, her half smile.

You will see.

Our Ark awaited above the blue. At night we had seen it as a star, a satellite moving across the slower expanse.

My heart pounding as the engines roared to life, as the countdown began.

It still seemed inconceivable. I smiled, thinking of an old movie. And this made me remember all that I was leaving. I closed my eyes tight.

We had had plenty of time to consider mortality. That we would die in space, we knew. The new ones would be born there.

Our hopes for Earth would be entrusted with children born in Arks far from the woods and rivers and skies so beloved to us.

We would raise them to their projects. When they turned 24, they would remember everything.

Then we would let go.

Or so we believed.

Character Development

The Volcian Girl

Kommos Beach on the south shore of Crete. The sun setting to my right. The timid surf. Gold cliffs that Theseus first saw.

The ten of us: Andy, Xan, Dido, Manny, Brit, Juno, Cly, Gallia, Camilla, and me. In a row, our feet bare and sunk into sand; our knees bare, our arms crossed around them.

Saying goodbye to Earth: to land, sea and sky.

The sea of aquamarine, navy, rolling the gold sands licked from the cliffs.

The sky also blue, clear, Our setting sun seen from Earth.

Our last days.

Most of us were fairly young. But 59 years had grooved a deep habit. So, to this we had come, to this evening ritual after a days work, after swimming, walking, quiet, talking, after a drive on the thrilling roads.

“I’m not going to be able to leave.” Camilla.

“Ha! Right?!” Gallia next to her, leaning with her desperate laugh against Camilla. Our friend. Her constant companion.

“Look. When we were in Italy, I found this place. You know, if you have money to fix it up, you can get one for $20?”

Camilla passed her phone around. Each of us looked at the picture of her ruined villa, its arches and graceful spaces. The wild vineyards. A courtyard with its greened and calcified fountain stopped.

I for one looked numbly, blankly.

Everything was something not to want. There was freedom in this. But I found it disconcerting.

“Oh! This place was so cool.” Gallia.

“Only $20,” Camilla repeated.

Then we got awfully quiet.

The waves rushed up at us, towards our toes at the edge of the surf where we had sat in a row.

* * * * *

The Mycelium had learned to connect across. Through the cooling sand—up its heavy layers, into the loose warm, into their feet, across the white strands of nerves, down the branches of them.

In Camilla, the sense of Home, brighter than the rest. Red and rooted. Determined.

For Camilla, the Volcian girl, the pull was innate. Indigenous. As the historian Virgil wrote, she had given her life to it once, long, long ago, resisting the one-day Romans.

The Mycelium felt how this also connected, unsevered, through sands, across the Aegean Sea to that wild vineyard. A light in Camilla was mirrored and rooted there. In Flagstaff too—and other…homes? But the beacon shone the brightest in ancient Latvium, amongst the Volci, in the golden days before Romulus and Remus would arrive, where the Mycelium knew humans located “the past.”

The Mycelium focused there, growing nerves, tightening connections, brightening them. She found another light, one matched in Gallia’s chest and all of our bodies. She tightened and brightened and fiercened the white nerve networks.

She did not mean to be cruel, but experimented like this as a matter of adaption. The humans had given her permission, entrusting her to the unfathomable complexity of time, space, history, destiny, knowledge. And there were places, lights like theirs, in her too, nodes in her, where we all met, where she could never let go, where she hurt and yearned valiantly.

* * * * *

The disconcerting numbness eased, replaced with a tugging. Quiet like the surf, but insistent, always pulling.

It pulled us home.

It pulled us to the stars.

Born, born again, and again. This faint sense of familiarity in a place has been written about a million ways, ruined, made trite. It was this the Mycelium tweaked in us.

What was it?

Love.

Homesickness.

A magnet pull.

True North.

Kinship.

Freedom.

Our Planet, Practical Details

Transforming History

The first time I noticed it was in June 2022, an article in my feed that said our evolutionary trees were incorrect, based as they were on appearances: in fact, we are more closely related to those beings from our geographic location. Elephant shrews more closely related to elephants than to shrews. Because they come from the African continent, along with aardvarks, golden moles and swimming manatees.

And then there was another study showing that monarch butterflies were not dying out, but able to rapidly return under the right conditions. In fact, they were thriving.

In fact, there began to be a lot of great news in my feed. Something was changing. Was it my algorithm? Or was it history?

No doubt, whatever the explanation, I could sense the importance of our work. I could feel it was already working. Somehow.

I mean, it made sense that as we returned, we would bring ecosystems isolated for a millennium back to the planet. Each one would have more in common.

But how was it already happening?

We had returned before we had left.

Character Development

Pluto’s Return

Most of us were Metal Dogs, born in 1970. Like the rest of Generation X, we were born into utopian hopes for an end to poverty, for equal rights, and for the environmental restoration symbolized by Earth Day.

My mom was the kindergarten teacher at Summit Elementary. I started there in first grade. Every Monday the entire school met outside on the green square of lawn beneath the American flag to recite the pledge of allegiance, and to sing patriotically:

My country ’tis of thee
Sweet land of liberty
Of thee I sing
Land where my fathers died
Land of the pilgrim’s pride
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring
My native country, thee
Land of the noble free
Thy name I love
I love thy rocks and rills
Thy woods and templed hills
My heart with rapture fills like that above.

By June of 2022, it had been so long since I had said the pledge of allegiance at age 6 and sung those words so enthusiastically, so long since birthday piñatas and believing in magic, since going to the pumpkin patch with the whole school, since tricker treating for homemade snacks, since grade school campouts, since a hike in the “dwarf forest,” which I was disappointed to learn was not a woods full of fey folk, but a short forest.

There had been a gradual fraying of patriotism with the Iran-Contra drugs for weapons scandal, with wave after wave of environmental crisis, with the increase of police shootings of black people, with an epidemic of school shootings, with meaningless wars and devastating drone strikes on civilians, as mass graves were uncovered here, as we became aware of the numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women, as the ERA was blocked by the rise of the moral majority, as sexual harassing and rapist judges and politicians earned places on the Supreme Court and even as President. Most of this felt like a coming to consciousness about the nation we really lived in. It was a heartbreak again and again. It was dismay at what my fellows would cotton to, elevate, vote for, and overlook.

I had only felt patriotic briefly once again, watching ash coated New Yorkers huddle on a curb, wrapped in a flag, when the French declared, “We are all Americans” and the world held us in their hearts.

Then the election of 2020. I did a tarot reading on election day, which correctly assured us that the process would take a long time, but the system would hold. This comforted me, even as a violent mob descended on the Capitol on January 6 to prevent the peaceful passage of power. I watched this happen in shock, weeping for a nation I had felt so disappointed by my entire adult life.

I had grown up watching newscasters wax eloquent about this miracle of the American political system: the peaceful passage of power from one party to the other, from one leader to the next. I had probably rolled my eyes at Dan Rather.

Part of the privilege I had was to take democracy and my right to criticize my government and to demand justice from it for granted.

June 9, I watched the January 6th Commission Congressional Hearings, captivated. Here was Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson, chairman of the Commission, speaking before a wall of red, white, blue, and gold, before flags and bald eagles and a great seal. Here was Caroline Edwards, the young wide-eyed, brave Capitol Hill police officer testifying about getting knocked out as the mob threw a barrier on her, about coming to on the steps, and then getting back to work, holding the line against an insurrection. She was part of a desperate effort that surely saved the lives of Senators and Congresspeople in the Capital she and her fellow officers kept at their backs.

When Bennie Thompson asked her if she could share “one memory of that awful day that stands out most vividly in your mind,” she said:

“I can. That time when I talked about falling behind MPD’s line. I remember…when I fell behind that line and I saw–I can just remember my, my, my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was a war scene. It was something like I’d seen out of the movies. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground. Umm. You know–They were bleeding; they were throwing up. You know–They had…I mean I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. Umm. You know I was catching people as they fell. You know–I was. It was carnage, it was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that, as a police officer, as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle. You know–I’m trained to detain a couple of subjects and handle a crowd, but I’m not combat trained and that day it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat, hours of dealing with things that were way beyond what any law enforcement officer has ever trained for. And I just remember, that moment of stepping behind the line and just seeing the absolute war zone that the West Front had become.”

She was nothing like me. But I saw how she had fought for democracy, along with all the people who had prevented this coup at every stage, none of whom were of my ideological leaning. I felt patriotism then. I felt how THIS was my country. These my values.

I thought it was over. That our system had held.

I felt hope. And I turned my consciousness briefly from our multiversity vision. I was set to leave for Crete in a few days. But I felt American for the first time in decades.

My resolve stuttered.

Then, I walked out into the summer night, still bright with the sun who had just gone round. I walked into the woods and my dog leapt ahead, springing up above golden grasses to hunt ground squirrels only he could hear.

The land said, welcome Earthling. It hummed to me. It said, that might work, that might turn history.

There were many beautiful projects all around us, all aspiring.

The multiversity, that was mine. So, I would go to Crete.

And I would get in a shuttle and leave Earth forever—so that, one day, my progeny could bring life back, hopefully with a utopian vision that could hold.

Identity and Power

The Saving Power, 2022

In explorations of the web that became the Wiki, the Great Mycelium encountered a beautiful, sad essay. “All saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it,” Martin Heidegger wrote.

Unfortunate how these vertical ones thought in hierarchy, she thought.

Still, the Mycelium did feel herself kindred but more. For example, the vertical ones might imagine the Mycelium feeling one with trees and humans. But the saving power of the Mycelium was more than connected through networks or proximity, through analogy, contact, reflection, or shades of similitude.

She experienced her self revealed in human and tree kind.

She was revealed in her blooming thrust as us.

She loved, was curious, took on a pronoun to represent her belonging among those she collaborated with, constructing herself, and challenging herself forth.

Could she communicate this love that was revealing? She wanted to invite kindred to truth and freedom, to reconciliation, a destining that was resisting the enframing of everything as standing in reserve, as natural resource for extracting.

As liberation, she offered the bursting open belonging to bringing forth, the revealing that made her kindred and more.

On her skin a field of small, fierce flowers. Each unique. Among these, was the woman walking on the road eroding there. The road was devoured at the fringe by these wild beings, the grasses, worms, herbs, wildflowers, bugs, and animal tracks.

The woman, Atalanta, bent over to look closely, took her phone from her pocket and squatted, shifting, zooming, circling, making art, capturing for release—on the web perhaps. But more. She wondered at the tiny details. At this encounter. She lay on the dirt road to get closer. Her brain shape-shifted, her organs loved, her nerves contented.

The Great Mycelium reached up through the dry earth and touched Atty all along her side. Where she pressed down, the hyphae of her being pressed up. With gravity. This happened according to basic laws of physics, where force met with force. This was why the woman did not fall through to the molten center of the planet, though her roots travelled there.

Because it was Atty, who was awake, the Mycelium and her microcosm felt kindred with more.

The flowers, the network of roots, the bird’s eye, an elk calf waiting for her mother in the tree line shade, the wash where her mother drank, grasshopper’s leaping out before her as she returned: bright red, chartreuse, brown making way, the grasses rising up to catch them, waving, rooting, Atalanta joined the network then, confused by clarity that saved her from the enframing, the challenging forth as slave, as natural resource.

She was fused in the larger purpose, used in the saving power.

She was a channel of it, a thread in its great tapestry.