Fungify

Izo-time reading and contemplating brought me to David Haskell’s The Songs of Trees.

The communicative intelligence between tree roots and fungi is something to behold. Haskell (p. 115) observes genetic chemistry between tree roots and fungi results in a fungal wrap around roots. This wrap mediates communication between roots and soil, protecting tree cells from pathogens and allowing the uptake of minerals. Trees responds in kind with sugars from their leaves. Reciprocity from deep listening and dialogue.

Within our own internal microbiome there are similar communicative intelligences and mutually beneficial relationships. One of the most well-known is the relationship between our gut health and mutually beneficial bacterial communities a subject for another post.

Back to communication and listening, our body systems commune through micro-movements at sub-cellular and cellular level and then upwards into bundled transmissions that “we” apprehend as our sense of touch – somatosensory experience. There are subsets with this somatosensory field such as proprioception, pain, pressure, texture, vibration and more. From the perspective of Body-Mind Centering^® all these bodily processes are rich expressions of mind and particular forms of intelligence. My interpreting of Body-Mind Centering® practices suggests an aesthetic and regenerative dimension to tuning-in to these processes. Slowing the velocity of thoughts, listening and simply resting attention in sensation is a good place to begin.

David Haskell concludes, trees are the great connectors and express networked distributive intelligence. It takes a simple change of mind and shift in attention to see similar sentience within us. As Tyson Yunkaporta author of Sand Talk maintains Australian Indigenous thinking, knowing and being resides in the connections, the relationships between the sentience of the natural and human worlds. Something worth listening to more deeply…