The natural world offers countless examples of creative intelligence and innovation in action. In fact, a whole field, “biomimicry”, is devoted to emulating what can be learned from biological intelligence. The mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms, is a wise and efficient natural network that provides a potent metaphor for our “social mycelium” — which is a central metaphor in A New Republic of the Heart.
Threadlike “mycelia” spread through the earth or other organic matter. They can be tiny or enormous. When conditions are right the mycelium blossoms and mushrooms appear. But it can stay dormant for years. Meanwhile, it works symbiotically with photosynthetic vegetation to create soil, and to redistribute moisture and other nutrients. Thus, it can operate as a kind of distributed intelligence.
The “social mycelium” is the mostly invisible underground filaments of all that is healthy in human culture. Our relationships are seeded and nourished by our innate wholeness, whose roots intertwine across the planet, and which are spreading, surging, right now, when our health and wholeness are threatened by fragmentation. Like its biological counterpart, the vast and potent network of our social mycelium is often hidden to the casual observer.
I invite you to view this brief video where I suggest that at this very moment, as the wholeness in you meets the wholeness in me, the social mycelium is poised to “bloom” into a New Republic of the Heart, by healing the life-destroying patterns endemic in our world and restoring balance.
To our evolution,
Terry
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