Alliances of Aliveness
I dig myself a hole in an opening of a thick pine forest, looking for aliveness in dark soil. Next to me, on a carpet of moss, sits a basket with various species of foraged fungi: oyster mushroom, turkey tail, and tinder mushrooms that inhabit decaying trees; a handful of chanterelles, the great boletus, and a couple of morels. Some of them I will fry for dinner later. Others, I will bring to my studio, where I grow mycelium and experiment with fungal biomaterials.
The hole expands and deepens, and soon I reach the sturdy roots of surrounding pine trees. With dirt-covered hands, I scour for endpoints of rootlings where they merge with fungal mycelium. I look for a network that holds the ground together. Invisible, it lays expanded across the underworld. I don’t know where it begins or ends. I don’t know where I begin or end.
I climb into the hole, curl myself in between moist roots. Holding onto them as if I was mycelium itself—connecting trees together by placing myself between the hard cellulose of wood. I can almost feel how sweet sappy sugars flow into me, while nitrogen and phosphorus leave my body to reach the trees. When my aliveness is entangled with your aliveness, we pronounce the sentience of our relationship to the world.
But what happens when these alliances of aliveness are disrupted by loss?
Sympoiesis is this process of recognizing that I am because you are. And you, whoever you are: a mushroom, bacteria, a pine tree, a river stream, a centipede, a human, or a crow—I cannot exist without your existence. My mind tells me that I could survive without you, but it fails to see you and me embedded in this interdependent ecosystem of life.
In Sympoiesis, relationality is the recognition of an undeniable and indestructible entanglement of life; and the effect and impact we have on other species, as they have on us.
It is to regard other species as equally deserving of life, reverence, kinship, and communion. It is the ending of extractive and objectified relating that has revered other species as non-venerable materials, meant for anthropocentric pleasure, progress, and power.
Sympoiesis is the recovery of this relational memory.
In our work, we ask: how can we integrate multi-species imagination and perspectives into our individual and organizational decision-making? Can we dig a proverbial hole—a container for perception-expanding experiences and submerge ourselves into the web of relational impact?
