“We are a family of cells making sense of laughter, a watery collection of tireless vitality.” Learn about “queer ecology”, in a new Advaya course
"You should know that our consciousness moves like a stone skipped across the wimpled belly of a lake. Each ripple a neighborhood, a body of gifts. Our thoughts are boulders plunked in soft earth by glacial retreat, each forming a new-millipede-centre-of-the-universe.
‘We are a family of cells making sense of laughter, a watery collection of tireless vitality. We are a long-tongued bee lost in legume and clover and a blanketing dayscape of small biotic collisions.
We are a newt-filled dawn and a mud flat packed with clams. We are a split gill with twenty thousand sexes; a termite queen basking in adulation.
“Knowing this will always protect you."
From “Continuation”
Wild and exciting stuff from Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, who is presenting a course with Advaya titled “Queer Ecology”, starting April 16th 2024. They define it as answering this question:
What does it mean to live symbiotically? At the heart of this question is the recognition that we are relational creatures. Whether those relations are mutualistic or competitive, or any in between, in this worldview, we are all related.
As Patty has shared, this view—that these types of symbioses are integral to the world as we know it—challenges a deeply ingrained understanding of us as individuals, and understanding that births concepts such as 'the self', 'us' and 'them', even 'normal' and 'not normal'.
So when we are asking this question, of what it means to live symbiotically, we are already investing ourselves in building a different world, finding a different way.
Above is a video setting out some of these ideas from Patty herself:
In this conversation, we discuss the study of mycology, ecology and queer theory, and how they can bring towards a more expansive way of looking at the world. In this spirit of the inquiry of the course, we talk about what 'normal' means, how focusing on what's at the margins reveals important lessons, how we got here (the world as it is constructed), and how we move toward liberation.
Patty invites us to see fungi as our teachers in interbeing. Fungi form mutualistic partnerships with most terrestrial plants, exchanging vital nutrients to the plant which is exchanging carbon from photosynthesis—partnerships that have enabled the evolution of plants throughout evolutionary time.
For this, and many other reasons, fungi are ancient teachers in learning to be together, and we have much to learn from them.
