Becoming the Stability of the Earth: Part 3
Image via Wonder Portals by Marika Moffitt
As the world continues to slide into chaos and transformation, we will need to stay close to what it is that actually provides stability, which is our relationship to the Earth, her cycles, and to our deeper selves. Our natural selves. In that natural place, we can look out and remember how to meet our needs in ways that lessen harm and quicken the Earth’s rebalancing. That remembrance comes on strongly when we observe other living beings who are, in spite of climate chaos and environmental degradation, still meeting their needs in life-giving ways.
The primary way that we humans meet our needs at this point in history is through working to earn money in order to purchase things, whether it’s food, housing, clothes, or subscriptions to online communities. Nowhere else in the natural world do we see organisms utilizing a currency in order to meet their needs. There may be resource sharing or mating rituals that involve an exchange, but we don’t see plants, animals, or fungi co-existing with an intermediary like money. While we may have forgotten how to meet our original needs in life-giving ways, the other more-than-human beings around us have not. The fungi, the plants, and the animals all remember and show us every day how to be in this world without destroying it, and they are our wisest teachers in this area of study. Without their wisdom, I can’t see how we’ll step out of the whirlpool of capitalism and into a way of being on this Earth that is sustainable for our species.
On a more personal level, it’s also incredibly empowering to see that there are other ways to meet our needs than just hoping to inherit wealth, working for a wage, or depending on state aid. Our options are very narrow inside of capitalism, but if we step out of its trance, we can see that there are many other ways to relate to our needs for closeness, sustenance, shelter and freedom. As we nurture our core needs in new/old ways, we catalyze the growth and blooming that is ready to be unlocked within us as well. In this section, I’ll be offering some of the major lessons I’ve learned from these more-than-human kin and how they can teach us to meet our ancient needs even as we exist in this modern context.
How Fungi Meet Their Needs
Some of our oldest ancestors are fungi, and while we may no longer be on the same branch of the evolutionary tree, our paths are forever interwoven and inseparable. These old, prolific, mysterious beings have so much to tell us if we will get low to the ground and listen as our forebears once did. It doesn’t take long when studying the fungal world to see that these beings are truly sentient. Their underground intelligence, which makes life possible for so many other organisms, is something to behold, and you can sense the aliveness that pulsates around and through them as they appear and then disappear, subtly changing the environment as they decompose what’s dead or link up with the soft roots of a new sprout.
Fungi are heterotrophic, which means that they have to obtain their nutrients from other organic matter outside of themselves. This is in contrast to organisms like plants, which are autotrophic, who make their own food from sunlight via the process of photosynthesis. Rather than ingesting food through a mouth like an animal would, fungi utilize digestive enzymes secreted through tiny filaments called hyphae to break down organic matter into its elemental parts and absorb them into itself. One fungal being can create winding, extensive networks of hyphae, which are collectively called mycelium. As the fungus absorbs the nutrients that it needs, it may fruit and form a mushroom, which will be the liftoff point from which thousands of spores will take to the ether and land elsewhere to sprout their own hyphae and start anew, so long as the conditions are conducive.
While all fungi absorb their nutrients, where they source those nutrients from can differ. Most fungi are saprotrophic, which means that their nutrients come through the process of decomposing dead matter, whether it’s a fallen tree, a coyote carcass, or stale bread. These fungi perform an essential recycling service for our ecosystems, transforming what is at the end of its life into materials that can support new life. Other fungi are parasitic, absorbing nutrients from a host’s body to the detriment of that host. Examples of parasitic fungi include the Candida yeast that can cause infection in humans, and a type of Cordyceps found in tropical and temperate rainforests known as the “Zombie Ant” fungus because of the way it infects its host and ultimately kills it, sprouting a mushroom from the dead ant’s head. The final major category of fungi are mycorrhizal: mutualists who embed themselves in a plant’s roots and receive sugars from the plant in exchange for serving as their water and nutrient delivery system. Mycorrhizal fungi are essential to plant life and may have been the reason that plants could more easily evolve out of water and onto dry land.
Fungi meet their needs through intimacy–they inhabit and almost become their food. As they weave into what’s in front of them, they break it down and transform it into nutrition, simply by being themselves and being present. Whether we need healthy food or a deeper level of freedom, we can meet those needs through pulling our life and what’s in front of us even closer. We can stop denying that we are hungry for more, or better, we can stop drinking the cultural Kool-Aid that rots our teeth, and we can claim what it is that we need and our desire to stop meeting those needs through extraction, drilling, and deforestation–both internal and external.
When we pull our life closer and really look at the state of our spirits, or our visions, or our material realities, we can speak the truth about what’s sturdy and what’s not and then choose to nurture a mycelial web of deeper stability, where resources and information can flow honestly and freely. But if we come upon a rotting carcass in our lives and refuse to look at it or deny its stench, we miss the opportunity to let it feed us. Our fungal teachers remind us how much nutrition there is in the process of breaking things down into their elemental parts and remaining intimate with this necessary aspect of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Their work to ingest, absorb, and transform decaying matter is an essential way to create stability on our planet, and the same can be true in our own lives and how we relate to the rot and decomposition that surrounds our needs and our ability (or inability) to meet them in the ways that feel natural to us.
Below you’ll find a podcast episode I recorded on this topic in case you want to go deeper:
How Plants Meet Their Needs
The new life that is growing within you this middle Spring needs resources in order to root in, grow a sturdy stalk, and sprout leaves and flowers. As this work is happening within us, it is also happening outside of us, and we can look to the plants around us for insights about how to grow into new levels of meaning and beauty at this time in our lives. Plants meet their needs by growing in two directions at once: deeper into the soul of the Earth, and higher into the spirit of the Sky. They absorb water and other nutrients with their roots, often with the help of fungal partners, and absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide with their outstretched green leaves. As they absorb from both above and below, the core of them is strengthened enough that it can support branches, or more leaves, or even flowers and, eventually, fruit. In their growing, they support innumerable other beings–by becoming food, releasing water vapor into the atmosphere, and “breathing out” the oxygen that we need to breathe in.
Plants show us that meeting our needs can be an exercise in beauty and generosity. In their growing, they support innumerable other beings–by becoming food, releasing water vapor into the atmosphere, and “breathing out” the oxygen that we need to breathe in.
These beings absorb free-flowing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and use the heat of the sunlight to activate a chemical reaction called photosynthesis that converts carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen. Plants are autotrophic, meaning that they can make their own food, which is the glucose they make through photosynthesis. The oxygen is released into the atmosphere as a byproduct that allows us and other animals to breathe. As the plant is able to meet its needs, it may eventually (when the time is right) produce a flower or a fruit. These flowers and fruits are often beautiful creations that entice insects and other animals into pollinating the flowers or consuming the fruit, which helps more life to proliferate and diversify. The process by which plants meet their needs and become a source of nourishment for others is inherently artful, delicate, and ancient–all qualities that stand in juxtaposition to the machinations of capitalism.
When we feel that our needs are unmet, it’s easy to become more constricted and hoard what we do have or try to get more of it. These are approaches that we’ve learned in civilized culture, and the middle Spring season is an ideal time to unlearn them. How might we mimic the plants’ approach the next time we feel disconnected, or in need of a better shelter? How could mirroring what the plants do actually enable us to step into the newness that is at our feet this middle Spring? The answers to these questions will be different for each of us, but generosity is the thread that should connect them all. The plants don’t fill out an application for more sunlight or pay a fee to access carbon dioxide. They don’t ask if you’ll be paying with card or cash before offering their fruit to you–it is freely available to anyone who would like to pick it and bring it to their lips. Their stability lies in their interconnectedness with all other beings on this planet, and when we seek to meet our needs in ways that honor how related we are to everyone else, we too can experience the abundance of sunlight and air, letting it transform us into the beauty and pleasure that we inherently are.
Below you’ll find a podcast episode I recorded on this topic in case you want to go deeper:
How Animals Meet Their Needs
Like fungi, animals are heterotrophs: organisms that can only sustain themselves by consuming other living matter. While fungi send out tiny threads of hyphae to break down their food, animals must move and reach out for it in some way, whether it’s through chomping on grass or pouncing on another animal to kill it. There are endless strategies available to animals, and our human ancestors would have employed many of them: foraging, hunting, grazing, trapping, and scavenging. What’s so educational about studying the ways that animals meet their needs is that we see how adapted each being is to their environment, and how adaptation has to be ongoing in order for them to survive through different seasons and changes in the landscape.
Today, human animals primarily meet their sustenance and shelter needs through forced wage labor in which they’re paid money that they can use to go and purchase things. We’re told that our needs for closeness and freedom should either be met on our own time, or through the work we do, but many of us can see now that we need more than small talk with co-workers or a two-day weekend. Our hunger is as intense as a jaguar’s, and our animal kin remind us that in order for our needs to be met, we need space to roam and migrate, just as they do. They remind us that what worked for one person in one place won’t always work for someone in another place, or that how we met our needs five years ago may not be how we have to meet our needs today. This inherent adaptability and flexibility still lives in us even as we’ve become more rigid in our culture of extraction and convenience.
How you meet your needs for closeness, sustenance, shelter and freedom will have to change as you change, as your needs change, and as our world changes. This comes up often in myself and in my work with others–the resistance we have to adapting. We get stuck in mental loops that tell us that we shouldn’t have to scavenge, or graze, or make a web in order to meet our needs. We may have a strong identity as a hunter, or a forager, and shapeshifting into some other form is deeply uncomfortable. For better or worse, however, we have no choice. As we grow into new edges this Spring and Summer, we will have to rely on our ability to transform more regularly, appreciating that each season within a season will ask something different of us. Our steadiness through all of that lies in our ability to accept how little we have control over and meet what comes as best as we can, with the resources we have.
As you relate to whatever newness is growing within you, consider how you’re feeding it what it needs. No matter what it is, it needs your time, practice, and attention, and how you deliver those nutrients will depend on who you are and what your life is like at this time. Perhaps you used to have young kids and became accustomed to scavenging little bits of time here and there for your creative pursuits, but now the children are older and you can graze more slowly. Or maybe you’re used to going after one big project quickly and with the focus of a hunter, and you can feel the invitation to weave an enticing web instead and see what gets caught in it. The only way to navigate these questions is by coming back to the practices that help you know yourself, what you need, and how to be in your life right now. All animals are capable of surviving when the conditions are right, but we humans have the unique ability to deny what the conditions are and try to force ourselves into strategies that aren’t actually effective or life-enhancing. This is why it’s so helpful to come back to the ground and observe what our wise friends in the environment around us are doing.
Below you’ll find a podcast episode I recorded on this topic in case you want to go deeper: