mycelial echolocation

a collective gathering poem of ecosystemic awareness in 17 voices and infinite echos

photo by TelmaGL

In 2021, I started ‘collective gathering poems’ with the words of people participating in teaching spaces of ecosystemic awareness that I have held.

It happened out of necessity to gift a final deliverable that was not sterilized by my individuality. Even if I am co-created by so many, I wanted to offer something that the community could take along to remember the gifts of the community. How could I ever do that through one voice, through my inner thoughts and singular hands?!

I couldn’t. So the ‘collective gathering poem’ was born to honor everyone’s voices, and the process is exciting everytime:

I chose to let my eyes wonder & wander through everyone’s words, istead of leting my mind process and dissect. When eyes haphzardly anchor on a word or expression, I taste it instead of interpreting it. I feel where it speaks in my body, does it burn between my shoulder blades? Does it make my stomach contort? With whom is it echoing? that’s how the stanzas are born.
I lend my body to other’s voices as mycellium, and intuitively weave a story of learning through quasi chaos.

In the begining one feels silly, and doubts that there will be anything coherent in the end. But I’ve learned the pleasure of resisting the tendency to control and alter the words of others, the delight in opposing both my shouting perfectionist and my insintent scientist methodist (and I am learning to enjoy greatly the ecstatic discomfort of proving myself wrong every time).
Because it turns out that the co-creations of this process move throught depths that I was coward or ignorant to explore, with more aliveness than the familiarity of my own thoughts could ever.

Perhaps this is close to how an ecosystem feels: becoming alive through complex relationships and echos. Isn’t that truly what we are too?

Below are the 17 voices of the “Mycellial creativity” workshop of ecosystemic awareness, held in January, interlaced in collective gathering poem. Each line, the voice changes. Let the stanzas move through, sense into the echos, feed on the courage, become ecosystem:

mycelial echlocation

Hopelessness is an expression of comfortable certainty that feels awfully uncomfortable on the body.

How pompous to think we know enough to shut down the space for the unknown.

I pulled the tower.

Dissolution,

a delicate aspect to bring up and hold...

.

Want people to wake up?

Every time I wake up,

I deny entanglement with the systemic violence,

I separate myself from collective suffering,

I drink coffee from water stolen from the river,

I use my guilt as an excuse to inaction…

Inaction set by fear, shame, victimhood, and isolation,

reflected in those around me or the collective at large…

.

I pulled the tower.

.

Guilt blocks us inside, and is manipulated to uphold status quo outside, but accountability, is a regenerative dialogue,

humbly moving in tense and creative diversity,

we listen to each other.

listening

listening

listening

listen fully and acknowledge wisdom:

the self-righteousness of blue jays, stone walls, black cats of grief, time itself…

.

Offering my whole self in all its failings

is so grounding and life affirming.

individualities and all the luggage they bring?

I love this too.

I am echoed by everything,

fears and hopes,

borders, walls, greed, pain,

faith,

the force in living beings,

stardust.

.

Breathing in the stars and releasing colonizations,

being part of something bigger,

Earth history in body.

Ephemerality.

The cosmic story of breath,

co-creation of fungi and algae bringing oxygen to earth,

wakes me up and I am moved to action,

it takes me out of numbness.

Breathing in the stars and releasing colonizations.

.

We join together in loving community,

the resistance.

We value more compassion than guilt,

and weave the love together.

We hold space for uncertainty and push on past the traps,

growth even when I don't yet see it…

We are not here to forget the violence, but to remember that the pain and loss are shared and we will not bypass it, but hold it for each other.

Wandering in the cracks with heart wide open.

Interconnectedness,

sharing oxygen,

absorbing, composting…

.

thank you for this beauty,

the last dinosaur.

In the modern technocapitalist world, which needs and rewards narcisistic illusions of I , ‘gathering poems’ are one way to remember that uncertainty, diversity and echolocation are regenerative ways towards belonging.

May these community echos hold you in the moments when sensing & witnessing the complexity & violence of modernity drain you & whisper lies of loneliness and hopelessness into your bones.

We will stumble towards just and sustainable futures, together, as ecosystem.