27. An Entwined Place

Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

“The world is an entwined place.” Dr. Teresa Ryan, of the Gitlan tribe of the Tsimshian Nation of the Pacific Northwest coast, offers a sentence both evocative and profound. It is the worldview of her people, and it also describes the fungal web of mycelium hidden under the forest floor. Dr. Ryan studies this mycorrhizal network alongside forest ecologist Dr. Suzanne Simard, who showed that the fungal threads link the trees and plants of a forest so they can communicate and share nutrients. Today we explore the worldview of reality as a connected place—how metaphorical threads of connection link all things; how these threads, like mycelium, are invisible to our physical eyes; and how this hidden network provides a good metaphor for Spirit. If the world is an entwined place, then all our current crises, from climate change to a pandemic, find their origins in forgetting connection, forgetting relationship. And the remedy for these ills is engaging in practices that soften the heart and remind us that we are connected so we can act with respect and care toward all beings.

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