Mushrooms in the Corpse of Empire

-what fungi, the small ones and the dead can teach us about being with this time-

with Kate Ash & Toad Dell

Corporations carve coal from the ground, coal that is the remnant bodies of trees that could not rot. Trees that died before fungi had evolved to decay them. And today, the ghosts of those trees fuel the climate crisis that sees our world poised on the turning hinge of apocalypse.

This is one apocalypse, our apocalypse. Fungi has seen them all.

Mycelium exists in webs of ever-unfolding complexity. They form networks of mutual care and nourishment, and yet also are a force of colonisation within the natural world. How can we learn from these teachers to create webs of interdependence, resilience and community care? How to break hegemony, how to carve out niches in the most unusual places? Living within the entanglements of an empire that has died but refuses to rot, within white-supremacy and capitalism and the lie of rugged individualism, how can we collectively create systems of abundance, regeneration and collaboration?

Deep in the fertile black of the soil, we find mycelial networks and blueprints for mutual aid and care. We find the small ones, the bugs and bacterium, churning the outworn into loam and new life. We find the dead, our dead, the Ancestors of place and of our bloodlines, waiting invisibly in the dark for us to rest our heads upon the Earth and listen.

This path will be broken into four segments over two days. We will be working with mushroom and other teachers to explore patterns of empire, how we can break down these poisons both within and without, how to be with this time and lean into decay, and finally discovering what blooms from that verdant mess, and the art of being good ancestors. We will be working with trance and sorcery, with time travel and art, with discussion and reflection, with ceremony and shapeshifting, with compost and soil. We will be getting our hands dirty.

Elements of Magic is a prerequisite for this course, as the tools of grounding and trance in particular are essential to the work.

Join us as we take these powdery, underworldly friends within our hands, and explore our relationships with the small, the invisible, and the dead, and how these relationships fractal endlessly, from the microbial to the human and out to the vast interconnectedness of all life.

May we become like the mushrooms. May we become good ancestors. And may we compost that which refuses to decay, so a new world may be born.