Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee,

host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

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

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads

connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Alongside our Shifting Landscapes Exhibition held in London last December, we held a series of

conversations with the exhibition's artists and emergence contributors

who explored the myriad ways we are deeply entangled with our changing Earth.

This week's podcast shares one of these conversations,

where I was joined by renowned mycologist and author Merlin Sheldrick and Marshmala Laser Feast creative director Barney Steele,

who was one of the creatives behind the exhibition's large-scale installation,

breathing with the forest.

They discuss the mycelio webs that infiltrate and sustain our landscapes.

Embracing the mystery and wonder of fungi as a means of

deconstructing our Western philosophies around the self, the nature of intelligence,

and the possibilities within community, we explored how the relational phenomenon of fungi

could soften the imagined boundaries between our bodies and the great biosphere.

I'm very excited for this afternoon's conversation. It's the first time I've met Merlin,

and this I think is going to be a special conversation where we bring together mycelial explorations

in the physical and digital realms.

I'm going to introduce Merlin first,

...