Organs Of Perception for Where There are No Words
An excerpt from Make Your Body the Prayer
ENTANGLEMENT
Dark threads weave the world, weave all the spaces in between, the spores, the vibratory mushrooms registering in the language of soil. Follow the threads, tune into the vibrations of all the other lifelines stretching among you. Put me into the wider context. You are also earth and webbing. You are embedded within a sea of eyes.
Organs Of Perception for Where There are No Words
I am standing at the roots of the oldest oak tree I have seen in my entire walk through the forest.
This oak tree is definitely a mother tree, an immense presence, ancient and slow with a huge burl growing next to her roots. (A burl, I later learn, is the way a tree responds to a wound to its trunk by using its additional bud tissue to fold over the wounded place and protect it.)1 At the roots of this ancient oak tree, right next to that wound-covered-by-budding-tissue-protection-place, fruits Maitake.
I sit down next to Maitake and began to talk with her, to tell her about my search for her and my realization of the pattern in my nervous system around trying to grasp at things, my process of giving up on trying to find her and listening to the forest instead. I am hot and sweaty and mosquitos nibble my skin as I ask Maitake if I can harvest any of her body to bring back home with me so that I can taste her.2
I listen inside myself to that place deep in my belly where I can sometimes sense communications from plants. I hear a “no.” That isn’t what this relationship is about. “If I cannot eat you,” I ask, “is there still a way that I can relate to you?” Maitake offers a little piece of her body to come home with me, not to eat, but to listen to.
When I return home, I place this fleshy fragment of mushroom body on my altar. When I sit by my altar to pray,3 sometimes I hold this piece of Maitake, turn my sensing inward, and listen.
Not long after my return from the forest, Azul Valerie Thome, my former grief-tending teacher, invites me to participate in a Council of All Beings over zoom. I naturally plan that I will attend as a turtle, since I have been spending a lot of time at my sit spot turtle-watching all throughout the fall.
But on the day of the council, I keep getting the message that I should go as Maitake. So I decorate my face with washable markers in the shape of the mushroom fragment on my altar and show up on the zoom call as Maitake Mushroom.
As Maitake, my body is filled with a kind of luscious sensual aliveness that I hardly ever experience in daily life. My receptivity is tuned to the mycelial transmissions of the forest root system, a dizzying cacophony of relationships, my own presence a humming pulsation fruiting up from the womb of the earth.
Poet and ecologist Johann von Goethe once wrote:
The human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the world; he perceives the world only in himself, and himself only in the world. Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.4
Although I would exchange the word “object” for the word “being,” this quote resonates with my experience of entering into different forms of perception through relationship with ecological presences.
My experience with channeling Maitake opened up a new portal of awareness for me to exist in. I felt such a savoring and enjoyment in channeling this mushroom-being that afterwards I didn’t want to take off my face decorations. And it seemed like the mushroom had more that she wanted to say.
At the time of this first channeling of Maitake, I had already spent several months trying to describe the approach to eco-somatics that I wanted to write about in my thesis.
But much of the language for what I was sensing didn’t seem to exist in my culture. I felt kinship with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s amazement that western biologists had no words to describe the process of life through which a mushroom rises upwards from the soil:
…our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. That which lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.5
The processes I had been trying to describe are so primordial, so close to the raw wildness of life that they have become practically invisible to my colonially-challenged kin.
Perhaps Maitake, as a member of this subterranean mycelium of the forest, could access a different form of perception to describe what I was sensing but couldn’t get enough distance from to articulate?
That night after the Council, with my face still painted in the suggestion of the mushroom, I open an empty zoom call and press record. Allowing the full sense of Maitake Mushroom to inhabit my body, I reach deep into the place inside of me where I feel my connection to the primordial center of gravity. Low sound and singing started to vibrate up from this place and I find my body rocking as my breathing deepens and slows.
As I become Maitake, I imagine that I am having a zoom conversation with a future Shante’ who is asking me questions. Folding time and space, Maitake listens and responds.
I tend to the deep layers, I turn my ear to the vibratory resonances that have been shaped by the weaving of myriad relationships. My fruiting body is a declaration of the potency of kin, of woven rememberings. I blossom forth from the roots of the oldest oak trees of the forest. I listen here in this place of counsel. I am quiet but I am thick with the pulsing flow of erotic life. I grow forth as nourishment, but I also grow as message. I am a messenger of what is still connected. I am a messenger of my ecosystem's unfolding, interweaving, interpenetrating, plump with the fullness of life.6
After recording the video of Maitake speaking through me, the next day I log onto another empty zoom call as myself, press play on the Maitake video from last night, and record the other half of the conversation.
Though I have a transcript of Maitake’s words beside me, the questions that I am asking and the knowings I share are unscripted and drawn also from a place of deep listening.
I record the whole of my side of the conversation in one take as if I am having a live zoom conversation.
Many of Maitake’s responses to my questions feel genuinely new to me, as if her words are molding to the context of my presence in ways that I could not have planned.
And in those moments when someone listens, when someone slows enough and releases enough of that constricted grasping at reality, in those moments, I reveal myself to them. I let them notice me. And I offer myself to be consumed. And what they don't know is that when they consume me, they are taking within them the brain of the forest, the organ of perception that sits at the roots of the oldest wisest trees, and listens to the weaving and the flow.
It has been as if there was a taboo within my nervous system about speaking about these primordial processes of relationship, those eco-somatic textures so inextricably interwoven with every encounter that they cannot be seen or spoken about by humans.
But Maitake can speak of them. From a different vantage point as the fruiting body of the mycelium, attuned to the tangible living process of the wider ecosystem, Maitake can turn towards the relational patternings of colonized humans and open a portal for us to see ourselves differently here:
Each one of you enters the world still connected, completely dependent on that wider ecosystem of relationship. Looking for the adults around you to be giving you nourishment that comes from the wider body, to be open portals into that wider connection…
When you come into the world and…the adults do not know how to meet the hungers within them with nourishment…the child learns that what is most precious to them…is what is least welcomed within the confines of their community and they begin to exile those parts of their medicine, of their center, to the very edges of their consciousness, to places of protection so far away that other humans can't reach them.
And one of the main things to be exiled in this way is that core self that can perceive attunement to this wider body, that can drop into a space of ritual, of ceremony, of connection to the sacred…
And so suddenly, instead of the connections of a community being based on the centers of each person's deep rootedness into the sacred, interweaving in a dance of centers to the creation of this microclimate…instead of this, the people are left without center. Without that shared mycelial weaving of intention.
And the system closes further into the isolated bubble of each separate identity trying to figure out what to do to be worthy of welcome, to be worthy of belonging…
No wonder it is so difficult to allow yourself to be seen in those deeper layers when your whole life you have received a message that those parts of you are not welcome, those parts of you will get you exiled.
You can thank wikipedia for this piece of ecological knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burl).
Asking before harvesting is basic plant-human etiquette which ethical herbalist friends instructed me in, and I subsequently read about in the writings of Stephen Harrod Buhner and Robin Wall Kimmerer.
In my own intuitive-animist form of prayer, which involves talking to the land and the deep time ancestors, singing and drumming, making small offerings of food, or just sitting in silence by candlelight.
I first read this quote in Andreas Weber’s book Biology of Wonder.
Kimmerer from the “Grammar of Animacy” essay again.
This and all subsequent Maitake quotes in this essay are from the Long Body Prayers podcast episode “A Messenger from What is Still Connected” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP8So5mpomI)
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