shroom talk

Hey all! I am not at home at the time of this posting, so I can’t do a recording of this week’s comix breakdown. So, I thought I might give the written word a moment to shine. I always am excited when I’m able to live out the Cattails philosophy with the making of Cattails, and using a diversity of methodology to express, feels in alignment with today’s comic!

Wednesday’s comic was a comic inspired by indigenous way of life and prayer. In ceremony led by indigenous peoples I always hear the phrase: all my relations. It evokes a sentiment that there exists relations outside of our nuclear family, outside our blood ties, outside our own cultures, outside the human realm.

And as I grapple with a world suffering from disconnection, I cannot help but see how our insular conception of the nuclear family has become code for the only relationships we prioritize or consider meaningful and how that disconnects us from all the care, support, and love that exudes from those who readily give, like the rivers, the sun, the ocean, and the peoples who surround us.

Cultures of less resources have for a long time resisted the model of the nuclear family, creating family outside of bloodlines. Yet, as I see resources consolidated more and more, the question that arises for me is: as we accumulate more, are we also recognizing the many more relations we are intertwining ourselves with?

Sundays comic is a shoutout to the shroom, the plant medicine that brought me into an understanding of interconnection. But it was learning about mushrooms themselves, where I learnt to not only understand this intertwining but to honor them.

Now a days, my encounters with the shroom are never so transformational as my early days. But they are my teachers and I am learning how to imitate their web. It is within this webbing of human relations that I am changing, shedding, and growing. It is the trip of a lifetime, and hard AF.

I wouldn’t ever have it any other way, and I stay open to wisdom from the shroom in the way it creates underground, decentralized, networks of support honoring a diversity of life.

Cus hell I know in these times, this is the medicine we need.