Inter-being and What Follows...
(as shared at Inner Fields BIPOC-centered Sangha, Jan. 4, 2021, all-sit)
As I've been looking forward to this meeting, the interconnectedness of everything keeps coming to the fore and a word I’ve heard over the years comes to my mind--inter-being. I am surprised and not surprised when I find out that the Vietnamese monastic Thích Nhất Hạnh coined the word "Inter-being." As a writer and teacher of writing, I appreciate the way he describes his thinking, as follows: The verb “to be” can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves, alone. “To be” is always to “inter-be.” If we combine the prefix “inter” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “inter-be.” To inter-be and the action of interbeing reflects reality more accurately. We inter-are with one another and with all life.
To me, with all life feels like it’s a lot to envision, perhaps too much, until I start to think about mushrooms and mycelium--mushrooms being the fruiting bodies we see on the surface of things and mycelium the expansive hidden matrices beneath them, beneath us, beneath everything. In his book, Mycelium Running, mushroom activist and entrepreneur Paul Stamets writes, I believe that 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. I am interested also in Stamets’ knowledge of psilocybin mushrooms and the ways ingesting them can help us, humans, move beyond self and ego to connect to larger spiritual forces of death and change and, yes, inter-being.
And yet, I am hung up on the fact that I am learning about this from Stamets, a white man, with my previous knowledge gleaned from the bestselling writer Michael Pollans, another white man (in his book Changing Your Mind). Searching paired-term concepts like “females and fungus” and “woman mycologists,” I turn up a paper on the vaginal mycobiome, as well as the notion that female mycologists of previous centuries were often imagined as witches, and that so much of our knowing about mushrooms, and perhaps about inter-being in general, that comes from indigenous and feminine knowing has been blocked, disembodied, atrophied, repressed, forgotten.
In a blog post from 2011, someone who identifies as woman, as “possibilist,” writes about power and civilization, shares an analog between fungal networks and human organizing; she writes, Mycelium begins its revolutionary, life-enhancing work by spreading widely yet inconspicuously, branching and linking, waxing strong. Then, when the conditions are right, the show begins. Mushrooms and toadstools – the colorful and multifarious fruits of the mycelia – rise overnight from the nurturing substrate and bloom forth in amazing profusion, lasting but a few days, feeding critters, opening minds, gifting the world with beauty, seeding other mycelia, and subsiding. Then, flower-less, we can do our work as the spores and hyphae, sinking through the grassroots into the soil, grouping, flowing, forking, communicating, forming under-the-radar alliances… growing a resilient power-sharing culture. It is in this list of powerful verbs that I really begin to see that inter-being is both the way things are and also a process of connecting, shifting, changing that proliferates with our awareness of it.
Finally, I’ll add one more voice, this verse, from Earthseed: The Books of the Living:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
Earthseed is the religion founded by Lauren Oya Olimina, the young Black protagonist in Octavia Butler’s novel, Parable of the Sower. It is 2024, and Lauren, who suffers from hyperempathy, loses her family and her walled neighborhood to mindless violence. She escapes to walk the length of a broken California that feels all too real--replete with hate politics to environmental devastation and literal plagues. As she walks, rests, ponders, and fights for her life, she builds ideas around Earthseed--described by one character as a combination of Sufism, Buddhism, and existentialism--and gathers around her a small community of other refugees and wanderers, of many races, ages, abilities. As I continue to follow Olimina (as she comes to be known) and her daughter (in the next book of the series), I’m thinking about the changes that conscious inter-being requires of us, and how our communal webs shape what’s possible, how by inter-being we make a future that reflects our values…
We cannot be by ourselves alone… (Hanh)
All that you Change Changes you, (Butler)
Sinking, grouping, flowing, forking, forming… (leavingbabylon)
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Other sources I investigated while preparing the above:
Beatrix Potter, mycologist: https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/28/beatrix-potter-a-life-in-nature-botany-mycology-fungi/
Hope is an embrace of the unknown: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/15/rebecca-solnit-hope-in-the-dark-new-essay-embrace-unknown
Woman warrior: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/opinion/women-hunter-leader.html
Afrofuturism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism
And a mycologist a collective-member shared with me during the sit:
https://www.instagram.com/giulifungi/?hl=en