Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people of present-day Marin County.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

From the first glimpse, a slime mold disarms you. At once, it's unsettling and charming, alien and yet deeply familiar.

Try to fit it through prisms of identification, animal, fungi, food, and it will evade attempts

at being defined so simply.

These shape-shifting beings, small and spectacular, confound our fundamental understandings of biology and our categorical

ways of thinking, and exist far beyond the boundaries of knowing that we have constructed.

In this essay, English journalist and author Lucy Jones explores what might happen if, rather

than trying to decipher such creatures, we instead

bask in the wonder of their obscurity.

Brimming with awe upon discovering slime molds in the woods near her home, Lucy is increasingly

drawn down to the forest floor and into their world of nonconformity.

As slime mold's non-hierarchical, non-binary ways of being

allow her to perceive the world differently,

dismantling delusions of human exceptionalism

with their ethereal beauty

and dissolving constructed boundaries with their metamorphosis,

Lucy wonders how else they might help humanity

step into wider ways of knowing.

The earth is stitched together with slime mold.

...