Offering Praise to Fungi & The More-Than-Human

4th Anniversary Celebration – Learning with Fungi small group reflections 📸: Lola @chicawithbees

I am thrilled to share that fellow Mycoverse Myconaut Adrine will be leading the Mycoverse next week, on Monday, Offering Praise to Fungi and the More-than-Human World! Continuing the theme of our Mycoverse workshops this season on playing, listening, and learning with the more-than-human world, the focus of this workshop will be on noticing and speaking to (rather than about) the more-than-human world.

Adrine will be sharing two of the exercises she learned last summer with the author David Abram at the Hollyhock Retreat Center on Cortes Island, British Columbia, Canada, where many of the thinkers we discuss in the Mycoverse gather, including Paul Stamets, Merlin Sheldrake, and Erin Robinsong.

To learn more about David’s work, Adrine recommends checking out this thought-provoking conversation between David Abram and Merlin Sheldrake on Magic and Ecology.

Link to the workshop below:

Monday, September 22nd, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation

Get Your Workshop Tickets! 🎟️

“There are ways of speaking that open the senses and ways that close them down.” – David Abram

To paraphrase David Abram, these exercises live in the realm of speaking that opens the senses.

To develop a mutual regard with the more-than-human world, to touch and be touched, see and be seen, listen and be heard, choose a being and be chosen by them. These practices open channels of exchange and connection, to become porous with intention. To remember our senses as points of reciprocity, as “participatory organs”.

✨🌜 A meditation at the start of the workshop will be lead by Vanessa Machuca to ground us. 🌛✨

📝 About the creator:

David Abram’s work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human body and the breathing earth. A leading proponent of the more-than-human turn across multiple disciplines, in 1991 David coined the phrase "the more-than-human world" in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind (and all our cultural productions), yet always necessarily exceeds humankind”.

👋 About our workshop Facilitator and Organizer:

Adrine Arakelian is a naturalized, life-long Angeleno working in urban planning and an urban ecology enthusiast.

🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🪾🍄‍🟫

• It’s the last day to submit a comment, please comment “I oppose” here! The biggest threat to fungal conservation in the US is the rollback of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, where they will pave places like Los Padres National Forest for extractive industries like timber and mining.

• Michael Pollan’s next book on consciousness is coming out, after many years of exploring fungi, psychedelics, and meditation.

• Tonight, fellow Myconaut Umi Hsu will be performing Playing with Critical Yeast featuring recordings of live yeasts – honored to have been invited to be part of this project and for the Mycoverse to inspire this work! Check out the performance at Human Resources in Chinatown at 7pm.

• Wanna learn more about fungi who grow on poop? Look no further. (there are many of these who live here in LA but not many people who study them if you’re looking to pick up a niche new hobby!)