🎉 July's Mycoverses and An Ask For Help 🏡🌈🙏
Save the date for our special 4th Anniversary Mycoverse Celebration 7/28!!
I know, things feel uncertain. Precarious as ever. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But have you ever seen a rainbow after a storm? Or during an eruption? Happy (belated) Pride 🩷❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜🤍 – photo from a recent trip with my mother to Yellowstone.
Dear Fellow Myconauts,
It’s hard to believe, but it’s already our fourth year coming together as a values-based community inspired by fungi, building better relationships with the more than human world. We will celebrate Exploring the Mycoverse’s 4th Anniversary on July 28th with a special guided walk on Learning to Collaborate with Fungi, designed by my friends across the pond in the UK, whom I met at the Telluride Mushroom Festival in 2022.
However, I first need to ask for your help – my partner and I need help finding a 2-3 bedroom apartment in the Alhambra/South Pasadena/Pasadena area. I am currently navigating a toxic-mold housing (and health) crisis, and I need to find a new apartment.
In some kind of Shakespearean tragedy, as a lover of fungi, I have fallen ill from long-term exposure to toxic mold in my apartment and need to find a new place to live. After testing, I found several toxic-to-human fungal species growing in high abundance. I’ll share more later, but I’m dealing with a lot at the moment. Thankfully, living away from my old apartment for the past few weeks has significantly improved my health.
I’ve now added the paid-subscribers option if you would like to support me and my work through Substack. As always, this newsletter is free.
🍄🟫📰👤📝👋 I was recently featured in NAMA’s Mycophile Quarterly.
Reflecting on my gratitude for my Exploring the Mycoverse community that has come together after the recent LA fires. “Perhaps we can let our grief for the damage done to the places we love teach us to love them back together again.”
📸 Photo credit – Robyn Beck
Activism & Braiding Sweetgrass – Finding & Sharing Your Gift
Monday, July 14th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation
👋 Welcome back to Arlington Garden as we revisit one of our favorite texts through the lens of – how do we take action and advocate for the more-than-human world during times of great greed, as we have witnessed recently in current events?
📚 Before our discussion, we invite you to read the following chapters from Braiding Sweetgrass (around 40 pages total)
The Gift of Strawberries
Collateral Damage
Defeating Windigo
Epilogue: Returning the Gift
✨ Bonus material to consider!
If you have the time, we won’t be directly engaging with the following material at length but they will be informing and grounding our discussion:
Shkitagen: People of the Seventh Fire (14 pages)
Windigo Footprints (8 pages)
📣 NOTE: We will be back at Arlington this month after their shed burned down, containing our tables and chairs. We have significantly fewer chairs to offer, so please sign up to bring one if you can. 🙏
4th Anniversary Mycoverse Celebration – Learning Collaboration with Fungi
Monday, July 28th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation
🎉 Join us as we celebrate our fourth year of Exploring the Mycoverse! Founded in July of 2021, at a time when the world felt lonely and hard, we made a community together, inspired by fungi. We pursued how to be in better relationship with the more-than-human world. We found love, joy, and purpose through these fungal adventures, which included over 100 workshops and reached more than 1,000 people over the past four years!!!
Fungi have taught us so much through their incredible diversity, ways of living, and creative ways of forming relationships.
Which leads us to how we will celebrate this year’s anniversary! We will take a guided walk together created by myconauts Lenka Vráblíková (Czech & UK) and Elsbeth Mitchell (UK). On this we walk, we will establish new and diverse relationships with nature and others, together with mushrooms. Inspired by life approaches such as collective action, the slow living movement, and radical mindfulness, it calls for establishing different kinds of relationships and cooperation. We will help decompose the old ways of being through unlearning lovelessness, selfish competitiveness, and rugged individualism. Now are the times that call for collective collaboration! During our walk together, you will learn something new about others and yourself - thanks to sensory, creative, and collective activities.
Let's follow in the footsteps of mushrooms and learn to live, move, and share with others again – and in better ways than ever! 🎊
🌟 Before our discussion, we invite you to:
Bring a story or lesson you've learned at Exploring the Mycoverse about community and collaboration!
📝 About the creators:
Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell write and teach about contemporary art, transnational feminisms and critical ecologies at Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of Leeds.
Since 2017 they have worked together on art and fungi projects guided by decolonial strategies, radical pedagogies, and feminist ways of knowing.
Elspeth is committee member of the Mid-Yorkshire Fungus Group (UK) and Lenka is an advisory board member of Kafkárna - Center for Arts and Ecology UMPRUM (Czechia).
🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🍄🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🍄🟫🌱🪻🍄🌳🐜🌲🕸️🌸🌿🍄🟫
Previously in the Mycoverse…
🧶🍄🟫🪡 Mushroom Embroidery Workshop Recap 🇷🇺
Forest Grandfathers: Russian Mushroom Wisdom And The Ancient Art Of Listening By Shagane Barsegian
Shagane wrote a wonderful, detailed recap of her workshop with us in June. Check out all the mushroom artwork and cartoons on YouTube she linked. Thank you, Shagane, for sharing your gift and cultural stories around fungi!!!
Survey Question! If you’re interested in discussing The Light Eaters again or missed last discussion, fill out the survey below. I’m trying to see if there’s enough interest to host another gathering on this mind-bending book.
Spores that caught our attention ✨
The Mushroom Keepers - a short film by Fungi Foundation’s India chapter is now streaming on YouTube
DIY oyster cultivation and solar cycling using a solar cooker by Damon Tighe. Loved the fermenting spent mycelium tip to prevent unwanted continued fungal growth (like of potentially invasive fungi like golden oyster mycelium from grow kits!).
Yayoi Kusama did mushroom paintings.
The utterly harrowing public land sales caught our attention, and many of us wrote to our senators. Thankfully it wasn’t included in the latest reconciliation bill but there are other things coming up like the recinding the ‘roadless rule’ that has protected our National Forests from roads and logging which will be detrimental to fungal habitats across the nation. Join us for the Mycoverse on Braiding Sweetgrass as we discuss activism to help fungal conservation efforts.
Stay safe,
Aaron