MERLIN SHELDRAKE on Embodied Entanglements /365
Photo by Valerii Zan of fungi blooming from a substrate of moss and soil.
Winding through questions of philosophy, science, and meaning making, this week’s episode brings together vital thoughts on what it means to live an embodied life in an entangled world. Guest Merlin Sheldrake shares the motivations that drew him to study fungi and the complex ways this study has shaped his life and thought.
As Merlin shares, “an account of life that doesn't include fungi is an account of life that doesn’t exist.” Our relationship with fungi is non-negotiable. Merlin invites listeners to pay attention to what this relationship means and how it shapes not only our lives, but the entanglement of life across the world. With this, Merlin also shares the ways fungal life offers a diversity of expressions and possibilities – offering up the perspective that the diversity and complexity of relationship and expression is what makes life fertile.
Across the episode, Merlin and Ayana contemplate the history and meaning of science, and come to see life as a process and a relationship, for “being is always being with and becoming is always becoming with.” The meaning we make does not come out of a vacuum, but rather out of relationship. The ways that we process information and create metaphors show us who we are as a culture. Life itself, in its many forms, is improvisational. Understanding this, we are left with the provocation: How might we speak to the world, rather than about it?
“The lives of fungi can jolt us out of well worn habits of thought, can help to make the familiar seem unfamiliar again, can help loosen the grip of many of our concepts and lead us into new ways of thinking…”
Photo of Merlin Sheldrake by Hanna Katrina Jedrosz
Merlin is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms.
♫ The music in this episode is “under a tree” and “One4G” by Matthewdavid.
Episode References
“Sarayaku victory against oil exploitation is an inspiration for the entire Amazon” | MOTH
Giuliana Furci & Fungi Foundation
Return Address: Erin Robinsong & Merlin Sheldrake
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
“Fungi’s Lessons for Adapting to Life on a Damaged Planet” | Literary Hub
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