This World Water Day 2021 I welcome you to consider your role in creating a new narrative which better integrates the human species with the whole rather than seeing humans as the apex of all Earth systems and ultimately, singularly deserving of the riches of this planet we call home.
We desperately need a new narrative. The playing ground from which access to water occurs is inherently unequal. Some, like me by twisted virtue of my white skin and where I live, have easy access to clean water. Much, much easier than many Indigenous to the lands called Canada.
We need a new way of thinking about who we are as a species and how utterly maladjusted we have become to the natural world, which is our truest home. So maladjusted that we pollute and destroy that which forms our very lifeblood—water.
Imagine that we are malleable enough to become beings that recognize and cultivate a sense of the sacredness of Earth. Imagine the beauty that can be restored. Imagine the healing that can be unleashed.
This inherent power to heal is ours to nurture. But it begins with a new way of seeing ourselves in relation to everything else. It quietly asks us to consider the interconnectedness of the whole shebang. I cannot think of anything lovelier than this. I cannot think of anything more beautiful.
My youngest sister recently sent around a CBC news story on a young gentleman, researcher, author and all- around someone whose genius and curiosity seem boundless; ecologist, biologist, mycelium explorer, Merlin Sheldrake.
She sent it because, she, like myself and our Seattle sister and our dear, phenomenally inquisitive, fungi- loving and mycology knowledgeable mother, are fascinated by mushrooms. Their appearance delights us and has driven our mother in particular, to all sorts of out of the ordinary pursuits to gain more knowledge. Our kitchen countertop in my childhood autumns was always host to paper toweling topped with mushrooms overnighting to gain spore prints for identification.
But what do mycelium have to do with world water day? So very much but that is not the point here. Rather, the point is that Sheldrake's research has brought him into a new way of understanding his place in the world. A new narrative is being formed within him and this is what I welcome most about my recent intro to Dr Sheldrake's work: the ways in which he delights in being changed by the very fungal processes he is studying. Now this, to me, is what makes him stand out from the crowd. He believes that mushrooms have much to teach us about the world and how we perceive our place as humans in it.
Thinking about fungi makes the world look different. The longer I’ve studied their behaviours and remarkable abilities, the more fungi have loosened the grip of my certainties about how the world works. Over time, as the familiar has grown increasingly unfamiliar, many of the well-worn concepts that I use to organise my experience – including notions of identity, autonomy and individuality – have become questions rather than answers known in advance.
The above quote taken from an essay on his blog:
Too many people on PEI, politicians in particular, still act as though water is an unlimited resource which we know it is not. They choose to fawn to industry rather than listen to their people who have long voiced concerns about water usage here. Despite the phenomenal advocacy work of many wonderfully devoted PEI citizens concerned about the future of water here the recent declaration of the Water Act is fraught with problems.
So many of our policies surrounding land and water usage serve to reinforce fixed certainties we collectively hold about our right to exploit land and water for our human needs—a right we perceive to be true.
Our 'fixed certainties" about our world are exactly what Sheldrake welcomes us to begin to question.
Our elected officials here could do well to be moved into action by the spirit the Water Act set out to embody. A spirit of reverence for something as fundamental to well being as water. In bowing to industry and economics they continue to deny the very sacredness of the living Earth.
This spirited openness to wonder is what Sheldrake intuitively makes space for in his own explorations.
I welcome us to truly study the slow, unnoticed symbiotic ways of nature. There is much to be worshiped there. There is so much more to learn. May we, begin to know how truly, deeply interconnected we all are—connected like the mycelium which underpin plant life. And how utterly dependent we are on each other and this glorious, this complicated world.
Like Sheldrake, may we be emptied of so much that no longer serves and may we instead be filled with humble awe for the gifts that Earth is endowed with. May we truly come to know what it means to value water.
I wish us the responsive inter-activeness of mycelium! I want us to know we are all one!
(Check out the music Sheldrake made of Oyster Mushrooms consuming his newly published book--unreal!)
And his book should be a great read!
Happy World Water Day!
Be well,
Jill