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.

It's easy to forget that the systems and structures we live within are inventions.

We're so entrenched in them, they feel permanent, and it's difficult to see beyond

them to alternatives. Capitalism, rationalism, human centricity, these aren't inevitabilities.

So how can we remember that there are myriad ways to be in relationship with each other and interact

with the world? How can we stretch and extend our sense of possibility?

And where can we find inspiration and wisdom to help us do this? This week, I'm joined by

acclaimed mycologist and author Merlin Sheldrig for a conversation about what we can learn from

mycelial networks about how to think in new ways.

Fungi are veteran survivors of ecological disruption, and they demonstrate a radically different

approach to crisis, decision-making, and holding duality than we do.

While we tend to work with binaries, fear, and control when navigating these things.

Mycelium works from a place of relationality.

Looking at how mycelium continually forms new relationships with their surroundings and other organisms to survive,

Merlin suggests that a world of wild possibility opens up when we remember the potential

within reshaping the relationships we have,

and forming new ones, even across species. And while, of course, we can't physically mimic how

fungi move in multiple directions at once, he says we can explore multiple possibilities at the same

time with our most mycelial-like tool, our imaginations.

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