Fungi Web of Life

DC and I have not long since emerged from the cinema. We saw 'Fungi Web of Life' featuring Merlin Sheldrake. The film co-opts our usual aesthetic to show the beautiful forms and colours fungi can make. Of course it would have been possible to show more cringe making pictures but that wouldn't have fitted the narrative. This isn't to suggest that I don't agree with the premise of the film, fungi are fascinating and as beautiful as any other part of nature. It's just that I noticed a certain construction in the film. A thought came to mind as it was pointed out that industrial scale deforestation is destroying not just the above ground forest but also vast swathes of underground fungal networks which contain huge amounts of information which we'll never be able to learn. This is the case with so much of the natural world we destroy. The thought - we have created a fungi like structure and let it loose in our world and now we have lost control of it and it is controlling us- capitalism. Fungi is an ancient life form and it has survived many environmental changes over earth's evolution. Different types of fungi will have had their period of time, come and gone, but the kingdom of fungi has sustained. Will it survive mankind? Will we sustain? At this time we really are dicing with death yet as a species we seem unable to significantly change our behaviour.

Fungi can terrify me. They rot wood! Childhood family trauma caused by building structural timber decay is very much part of my trauma history. And the nature of fungal hyphae and mycelium- spreading out taking and following the form of that which it consumes without itself having any centre of control is the stuff of nightmares! As Sheldrake is fascinated by fungal creation I am appalled by it's capacity to destroy. This is of course an essential part of nature- without it the world would be full of dead wood and the nutrients for future growth locked up. And so I have to settle myself, just keep the water away from wood we want to stay as wood! Water is the heart of life on this planet and it was interesting to hear in the film that there are aquatic fungi. These are even less well understood than land based fungi. Water is an element us engineers are constantly controlling as best we can. Again not entirely satisfactorily...

There's something about the flow of evolution and the waxing and waning of forms at various levels which leaves me feeling exposed. We all feel this to some extent and so we grip on to what we like. This film has left me feeling both this need and its futility. There is possibility in the amorphous.

Election Result

I find the landslide win at the recent UK general election by the Conservative Party depressing not just because of the direction they will take and the things they will do but because it says a great deal about both the political system we have and the people of the nation. Without going into reams of detail what I think we are witnessing is a huge failure by all of us to address the very issues which brought this government to power. Disenfranchised communities who backed Brexit and then voted for the Conservatives are those that have been hurt the most by the neoliberal processes which this government will now supercharge. Our political system is failing to address the need for detail, clarity, fairness and transparency. At a time when it is clear that as a species we are killing life on this planet at a frightening rate; loss of flora and fauna and changes to the atmosphere and climate are now well established facts, we are heading further and further down a separatist road. In a time when we need holistic global analysis and action to deal with the problems we face we are isolating ourselves and perpetrating the very economic folly which has fuelled this awful mess. On the world stage similar stories are playing out and international climate summits fail to make effective inroads as the world's politicians lack the statesmanship and vision to see that a paradigm shift is needed let alone to know what that shift is. Economists continue to talk about technology solving the problems while they talk of continued economic growth. Nowhere is there serious talk of what it is we as a species actually need to be happy let alone to even consider for one moment spiritual questions around the very nature of our being. This is the real darkness in all of this; we are going to go further and further down a selfish, narrow minded, me first road where the basic delusion of a separate self that can have whatever it wants with no care for the consequences is hailed as the only truth. When we could have come together in recognition of the basic human paradox; that we are both separate and absolutely one with everyone and everything, we have instead decided to take more of the same fruitless steps that have brought us to the edge of the precipice.

Across the ages and around the globe various cultures have understood that we are part of nature and have looked into the nature of man. The various philosophical, psychological, and religious traditions have taught ways to know and control the self. The mystics have pointed to experience between the individual and the unknowable ground of being. The arts have revealed windows and vistas through prose, poetry, music, painting, dance, theatre etc. etc. through which we expand our consciousness and come to know our nature. I suppose that I'm essentially working here with the belief that The Unborn (The Source, God, Oneness) through the illusion of separation gives rise to form that it may come to know its self. What I think the depressing feeling prompted by recent political events is about is a feeling that the majesty of the human experience, the warmth of compassion and the joy of creativity is diminished and that we may even run out of time and cease as a life form to exist within the very near future. And yet I must recognise my own projections in all this; the sense of my own mortality colouring my understanding. I simply don't know where we as a nation and indeed as a species are going. All I have is this moment. And it is good; I am very fortunate. All there is to do as ever, is take each step with as much integrity as possible. Joy is not precluded, nothing is certain, there is meaning and purpose. And I am reminded once more:

‘Grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbor the concept of different colors, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole.’

(Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 377–8.)

‘Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other.’

(Adorno, ‘Subject and object’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato 

and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 497–511 (p. 500).)

That I have the above quotes is due to my wonderful partner DC. That we have each other is so amazing and rich that nothing in these apparently dark times should make us abandon the colours and the peace, the warmth and the culture of the best of all of us.

As we find ourselves surrounded by the festivities of Christmas may we all connect with the Christ energy, the awareness of our true (Buddha) nature, the beauty of our paradox, the warmth of our humanity. And in the coming term of this government's office may we remember our true (Buddha) nature.