Last month I attended the Spiritual Ecology Study Club. The theme was ‘Fungal Associates’ — concerning fungi and the questions that arise out of them in regards to ecology and human society. And, as the session was ending, I wrote a couple of words to explore later, words that made every sense to me while thinking about this marvellous kingdom: “individuality as a beginning of a promise”. And I knew what I wanted to say with it, what I understood by merging those three words. Let me, then, write to you what they mean to me. Let me write about the way fungi touched me that day.
Fungi pose a lot of questions to humans. They escape dualism, they escape the idea of property, they escape mental constraints. Their existence doesn’t create these. Theirs is a nature of interconnection, plurality, expansion, possibility. As Patricia Kaishian says: “the way that fungi are in their nature, their being sort of neither plant nor animal. They have qualities of both fluid and solid. They form these webs of interconnection in which it's hard to differentiate an individual from a group or from a collective.” The fungi kingdom is a kingdom of interspecies collaboration, they create networks of nutrients and information among many other species. They feed, they transform, they share knowledge and life in this world, making life out of death and participating in the needs of others. Most of their bodies are underground, connecting plants and various fungi that have a decentralised way of growth. Mycelium, mycorrhizae, lichen… all of them are fluid when it comes to this. Identity isn’t closed off around individuality. It’s something mutable, alive. Fundamentally liquid. The same applies to humans and many other species. Individuality doesn’t make identity. But it is nonetheless real.
How do we think about individuality through the minds of mushrooms and mycorrhizal fungi? Just because fungi are fluid doesn’t mean this term doesn’t exist in their experience. Fungi don’t act on or answer by separating, reducing. They act by including, by accepting possibility. So, individuality is also possible through this lens. But what is it, if not sameness or repeated recognition? How do fungi include individuality in their fluidity? How can the idea of an individual be questioned, or even changed, by the lenses of fungi? How can we learn from them as to what pertains to our own singularity?
“Lichens are places where an organism unravels into an ecosystem and where an ecosystem congeals into an organism.” says Merlin Sheldrake in his book Entangled Life. “The word individual comes from the Latin meaning ‘undividable.’ Is the whole lichen the individual? Or are its constituent members, the parts, the individuals? Is this even the right question to ask?” We are also places where many become one and one becomes many. Our bodies are ecosystems. So, is it important to ask if there is an individual in the whole or in the parts? We tend to forget about our being as places populated by microbiomes. The individual part of us usually comes first. Exactly because of this, the question is an important one. There’s a need for us to define this experience of having a body that is more-than-one. By asking this question we are answering a bigger one. We get to change our perception. We get to feel the individual and the ecosystem. We get to feel whole.
Loneliness has always been attached to the sense of the individual. It is something experienced by a ‘one’. We have felt it, and we know that it is an important feeling. Loneliness has much to teach us, much to reveal. Although sometimes it doesn’t feel like it, solitude is a gift. One of revelation of the depth of life, a way to reach faraway places, a way to attain connection. What if loneliness pertained to this sense of wholeness, or lack thereof, in our beings? What if loneliness was an omen of something more to come? A way to feel our bodies as ecosystems, as places? What if solitude was a transition from a self-contained individual to a home of beings? An acknowledgement of a promise, the promise of individuality, the promise of becoming other that is elementally rooted into the idea of the individual? If the Latin indīviduus implies ‘that which is inseparable’, then loneliness is the state where we get to know what individuality really means, what means to be inseparable. Loneliness is a door to the understanding of singularity. And joining our feeling of being lonely with the fluidity of fungi is our venturing to the other side of that door.
If there is a ‘one’, an ‘individual’, then there is a ‘two’, a ‘ three’, a ‘four’, a ‘collective’. What can be the promise of individuality if not the process of becoming other, of becoming inseparable from the world around us and its beings and their web? Why do I think of it as a promise? Because it is a beginning, a start of something. ‘One’ implies ‘more’. Individuality is the start of interconnection, it’s our journey to feeling whole. And when I say becoming other, I mean housing, harbouring, accepting the other in our bodies.
To be an individual is to have made a promise, to have started a journey that can only see its ending in a surpassing of the individual, in becoming more-than-one, or in becoming one-with-others.
What do fungi teach us, then, about this journey? Sophie Strand talks about it when writing about the underworld: “Put more simply, fungi taught plants how to enter into the underworld. And it was only in the underworld that plants learned how to make community. Community that bridges differences: in species, in age, in biosemiotic language. Fungi taught plants that survival isn’t about individuation. It’s about becoming radically involved.” So, if there is to be a sense of the ‘singular’ in this lens, it’s about the ‘one’ as a starting point, as a journey to the whole chain of numbers. Or the promise is to become ‘one’ with the many, to be “radically involved”. Anna Tsing also touches on this in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: “We change through our collaborations both within and across species. The important stuff for life on earth happens in those transformations, not in the decision trees of self-contained individuals.”
To be some-one is to have a path laid in front of us, a clear path that leads us to collaboration and community, a destination which is to be seen less as an ending and more as a purposeful movement. That is what fungi teach, one of the things they can teach — there are many more to be uncovered. Maybe the start of this pilgrimage must start here: at the acceptance of what this kingdom has to offer, at being in conversation with others, other humans, other species, other kingdoms. If individuality exists it’s because it has a purpose in the interconnected web of it all. It deals with our radical acceptance of the other-than. And, if this is a promise, its work is called ecology — even better, “spiritual ecology”.
This is the way our conversation touched me that day: the acknowledgement of a promise of becoming, the recognition of a purpose for the sense of the individual: that of turning to and into others.
