They communicate messages between trees, warnings about disease in the neighborhood. Mycelia are made up of millions of miles of thread-like structures called hyphae, which are constantly reaching and spreading themselves and their resources. In what follows, I offer four questions (and possible lessons) that can bring us into closer alignment with the wisdom of mycelia.
I included the wisdom of mushrooms in my book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, and I have continued to study how mycelia actually works because it feels like such an important teacher for humans and how we need to resource ourselves and communicate in this time. In my reading, I saw that what mushrooms did for me was aligned with what they do in the world, what fungi do in the world. The experiences I have with mushrooms are rooted in profound connection, providing a sense of tether that I had imagined and perhaps tasted before but never understood to be a consistent truth I could tap into at any time. I also had a sacred experience of eating chanterelle mushrooms harvested on a slow day in Minnesota, and became obsessed with the earthy, healing strength of chaga mushroom tea for my knees.Īll of this aligned with the beginnings of my personal healing journey through the use of medicinal, or psilocybin, mushrooms. I first came to my obsession with mushrooms and mycelia through reading and hearing about the work of Paul Stamets (the American mycologist who has published mushroom scholarship classics including Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World and Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness & Save the Planet) and Margaret Wheatley (whose book Leadership and the New Science: Learning About Organization from an Orderly Universe encouraged me to look to the world around me for models on how to organize humanity toward more alignment with the Earth and each other), and a trip that Movement Generation took me on to the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, where I got an early taste of what it could be like to live in partnership with a fecund Earth. I am such a fan of the potential wisdom of mycelia that I want to slow down the trend of language here and explain what I know so far about what we can learn from the fungal world. Sometimes, in this fast-moving world of constant content, we can absorb terminology, and perhaps have a general idea of something, or just nod along when we hear the word, without really understanding the wealth of knowledge available to us.
In the past few decades, there has been a growing interest in, and scholarship of, mushrooms and mycelia.
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