My name is Lea Jane Aphrodite.
This is my little corner of the internet where I write about things I care about. This includes essays, poetry and fiction about the things that move me. Frequent themes are mycology, language, critical technology & ecology, collapse, anarchism, queer activism, and how we may find better, more authentic ways of navigating our entangled lives.
But what the hell even is a mycelialism? What’s a hypha? Am I insulting everyone who stumbles across this page? Let me explain!
I believe we are a mycelial culture. That means that much like how fungi interweave with many plants in mycorrhizal connections, so we as humans are intimately woven into mutualistic networks.
In a mycorrhizal association, the fungus colonizes the host plant’s root tissues, either intracellularly as in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, or extracellularly as in ectomycorrhizal fungi. The association is normally mutualistic. In particular species, or in particular circumstances, mycorrhizae may have a parasitic association with host plants. 1
Mycelial networks are made up of individual strands of hypha that probe and explore the world around them and send feedback into the mycelial system as a whole so that it can react to its surroundings.
That’s what we are. Human hypha in the mycelial commune.
So what’s a mycelialism then? They are those moments where we encounter these mutualistic weaves. They are usually brief and spontaneous. A momentary unification of threads into one pulsating node where you can feel the thriving world around you. These mycelialisms happen all the time. And we can make them happen more.
That’s mainly what I am interested in exploring. The interwoven nature of our social and material realities. I’d be happy to explore it with you!
She had always loved the ocean. From where she sat, perched precariously on the platform dangling from the side of the snow white cliffs she could see the waves lapping against the rock on windy days, the ocean slowly consuming the land and taking it away in its gentle caress. In a few hundred, maybe a thousand years, the ocean would have seduced the land at last and taken every piece of it into its endless depths. She would have to find a new job when that happened.
Today is Trans Day of Visibility and I thought I’d share my TDOV poem from last year, because I had no place to put it then and I quite like it. To all my trans friends, lovers, and favorites: Be proud of who you are and what you had to do to get here. This world is better off with you all in it <3
Here are some notes toward an essay that I would like to structure more, but the more I type the more I find and I’m trying to bring it to a point where I can call it finished and expand on these ideas in other pieces.
In her rant about technology, Ursula K. LeGuin describes technology as the “active human interface with the world”. She reminds us that technology’s prime function is to interact with our surroundings and that this privilege is not restricted to what she calls “hi tech”: