From the Mycelial Underground: On death-eaters, liberatory enzymes, and the practice of feeding new worlds

Happy Fungi Friday!

We are not immortal.

Neither is Empire, nor the systems of severance and supremacy we inherited.

Fungi have been choreographing the ancient art of turning endings into space for new beginnings for hundreds of millions of years. Many are saprotrophic, a fabulous fungal word describing organisms that derive nourishment from dead organic matter, helping return nutrients to the wider living world.

Sapros: rotten. Trophē: food or nourishment.

An entire manifesto of transformation tucked inside a single word.

The death-eaters practice their own earthy form of wealth redistribution, recycling what was once held as energy/matter in individual bodies back into the commons, so to speak. Gives one ideas.

What looks like an ending becomes another’s meal. A fallen branch becomes a gathering place, slowly becoming bodies and soil. The forest continues regenerating itself from the bodies of its predecessors.

Maybe it’s time to apprentice ourselves to them—and to our other decomposer and detritivore kin. Slimy slugs and slow snails, bacterial babes, wild worms, beautiful beetles, and countless other beings participating in the sacred undoing and remaking.

Of course, Empire’s impermanence does not guarantee liberation or other lifeways aligned with Life. There will be mess. There will be scars. There will be attempts at co-opting. What comes after—and what is already emerging alongside it—depends, in part, on what we daily practice and make possible together.

Culture building in bodies. Where we interrupt harm. How we practice repair and listen to Water. How we return obscenely hoarded resources to collective care.

What we stop feeding matters, and what we choose to nourish matters.

That is why I apprentice myself to earth intimacies. And why I want to learn more about and from this astonishing process and bring its teachings into both inner work and the material conditions that shape our lives.

Deploying liberatory enzymes, so to speak. Loosening the inherited stories of supremacy and separation—and eating away at the structures that keep enforcing them.

The Great Unraveling is not merely something to fear, avoid, or deny at all costs. What if we reframe it as the Great Composting—a grand deep cycle metabolic process whose unfolding we can help shape, even as we are wounded by it?

Then there is work and purpose for us: tending what is wounded, protecting—and falling back in love with—what sustains Life, and marshaling previously locked-up nutrients toward possibilities that bring us into deeper relationship with the animate web of life.

Eat Empire as it’s dying.

Metabolize the Rotten into nourishment for Life.

Feed the new worlds trying to be born.

MODELS: false turkey tail, fairy parachutes (Marasmiellus sp.), red-belted conk (fomitopsis pinicola complex), fir cone fungus (Strobilurus trullisatus), guttation on a red belt bracket, orange jelly spot (Dacrymyces chrysospermus), bird’s nest (Nidula), dyer’s polypore (Phaeolus hispidoides), rosy polypore (Rhodofomes cajanderi).

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Here in a mushroom shirt my neighbor gifted me for National Compost Empire Day, in front of my 12-by-12-foot horseshed-turned-cabin—headquarters of a small woodland insurgency—practicing my allegiance to the decomposers.

These inquiries are also at the mycelial heart of Becoming Beautiful Barbarians, a community of practice and inquiry for igniting imagination beyond Empire. Together, we’ll explore where its inherited stories live in our bodies and daily lives, cultivate our own liberatory enzymes, and nourish the worlds beginning to fruit.

I’m slowly gathering a small circle. If this speaks to something stirring in you, I’d love to have you join us.