The Future of Us: Can We Learn to Connect Like Forest Fungi?

I’m lying on my back, eyes closed, my body cushioned from the hard floor by my yoga mat. To my left, at the back of the room, the facilitator guides the dozen or so women in the room into meditation.

“Imagine roots extending from each of your vertebrae,” the facilitator intones softly. “With each inhale they grow. With each exhale they extend into the earth.”

The visualization is meant to ground us. It’s when my ‘roots’ begin to grow into those of the women beside me — I don’t recall if this is part of the meditation, or where my mind naturally went — that my ADHD kicks in, as if on cue.

“Helloooo Cordyceps!” My visualization turns to the opening credits of the Max TV series, ‘The Last of Us’, stunning artwork that depicts the fungal infection taking over the world. From there, my visualizing takes only a short hop to fungal zombies and death and survival.

It’s a twisted way to respond to this peaceful, welcoming space, I know. But I try not to judge. I’m a recovering trauma survivor, and guided group meditation is one part of how I am encouraging my nervous system to relax. We’ve managed to ramp down from the “hyper” aspect of hypervigilance. Now we’re working on vigilance.

There is nothing about any of these women that I think triggers my nervous system, which is why this is my second guided meditation in this group, and not my last. Yet while I’m still feeling rooted, grounded, my consciousness won’t quite relax to the point where I can achieve the extent of visualization another woman describes later. She was able to imagine being surrounded by mushrooms and fairies.

It’s during this part of the discussion that “Cordyceps” resurfaces. The mention of mushrooms has led to an observation by the meditation facilitator about mycorrhizal networks: symbiotic relationships between trees and the mycelia that grow among their roots. “If a tree is sick, the mycelia communicate that to one another, and to other trees,” she says.

It’s then that I have my lightbulb moment: what if ‘The Last of Us’ had it all wrong?

How Art Imitates Our Twisted Human Lives

In case you didn’t watch the series or play the video game that inspired it, ‘The Last of Us’ is about a man shepherding a teenage girl westward, from Boston to Seattle, where a team of doctors await her to research a cure for the Cordyceps infection.

(Yes, this is similar to Pedro Pascal’s other role as ‘The Mandalorian’; no, it isn’t exact.)

The world has fallen to the infection, which is able to communicate much like the meditation facilitator described. When they aren’t dodging fanatic activists, rapey preachers, or desperate, crazed survivors, Joel and Ellie encounter the infected humans.

Cordyceps is a real fungus — one that’s popular as a health supplement among humans. Although it’s unlikely that this particular fungus would somehow mutate and become harmful to our species, climate change does heighten the risk of fungal infections generally.

Even less likely is the risk that any fungus would “control” us the way some Cordyceps can in insects. But there’s science behind the entertainment: the fungal humans in ‘The Last of Us’ (call them humycelia?) are able to communicate chemically, even after death. That’s how they can simultaneously reveal where they were felled, and call for reinforcements.

It’s a primal sort of communication, one you can’t describe even in terms of instinct. When my group meditation facilitator described the way it helps other organisms, particularly the trees the mycelia are attached to, I realized the extent to which the modern world has twisted nature.

We are only recently starting to understand other species’ complex societies. This isn’t easy to do. The way we live, clustered in apartment buildings and suburbs, doesn’t lend itself to interacting with one another, much less observing, say, generations of elephants, or dolphins, or even other primates.

We’re so used to laughing about our idiot dogs and asshole cats that TheDodo.com is about all the opportunity we have to see other animal species “adopting” orphans, or perhaps less wholesomely, playing with other species in order to get high.

In other words, we keep trying to bend nature to our own (often Western, cisgendered) narrow world view.

This tendency of ours was nowhere more apparent than in another post-apocalyptic piece of cinema, ‘I Am Legend’. In that film, most of the human race has turned into vampires. Hero Will Smith, a military virologist, regularly captures them so he can test the cure he’s trying to develop.

In the film’s original climactic scene — which tested poorly among audiences — it turned out that Smith’s heroic research was actually a campaign of terror waged against this next evolution of the human species.

These vampires aren’t written as mindless zombies or a reduction to the most animalistic of our human tendencies. They’ve retained the social ties that made them human. Smith, it turns out, has captured the vampire leader’s wife. The leader just wants her back.

In this ending, Smith is able to empathize with the vampire leader. He’s spent the whole movie trying to exact revenge on the vampires for causing the horrific accident that claimed his own wife and child’s lives. At the end, seeing the partners reunite, he acknowledges that he’s the anachronism in this new world. He gives up and makes the trip north with his own newfound family.

No surprise that this ending didn’t test well, and the cinematic release has Smith sacrificially self-immolating, blowing himself and all the vampires to kingdom come so his new friends can escape with the cure.

To be fair, the cinematic ending may have been a way to head off a “vampire supremacist” outcome as depicted in the movie ‘Daybreakers’ and the book (and TV) series ‘The Strain’. In these stories, humans are subjugated as cattle, bred for their blood.

It remains to be seen whether ‘The Last of Us’ as either a TV series or in its next video game iteration, goes in this direction, creating a whole “humycelia” society. If it did, we might see humans and humycelia battling for dominance, as in the ‘Planet of the Apes’ movies.

We’d be missing an opportunity if it did.

Exploring Our Connectedness, and Our Fear of It

My group meditation experience highlighted my trauma-induced fear of natural human intimacy,the idea that I might become so intertwined with others that I lose sight of myself.

That I can even recognize that fear speaks to another meditative practice of mine: yin yoga.

Unlike more popular, active forms of yoga, which I’ve practiced for about five years, yin yoga — my focus for about the last eight or so months — passively emphasizes the connective fascia of tendons and ligaments. In addition to making the body more flexible, stretching these fascia is said to release stored emotions associated with trauma.

Yoga practitioners are fond of observing how the ‘lessons,’ or metaphors, make their way from the mat into the real world. With yin yoga, of course, the more physically flexible we invite — the more trauma we release — the more mentally flexible we become. More patient with others, receptive to their thoughts and feelings and ideas; kinder, more forgiving.

It’s as if by softening our own connective tissue, we strengthen our connective bonds to other humans.

Yin energy is, of course, feminine. To a society built on hypermasculine values, being softer and more yielding is seen as weakness — even when it compensates for individual vulnerability by making tighter social connections possible.

That’s where those on-the-mat metaphors get interesting.

We’re used to thinking of “fascia” as the connection between roof and wall, as well as between bone and muscle. But the Latin root, “fascis,” meaning “bundle,” has taken language in other directions as well.

By the 1590s, according to EtymOnline, a “fasces” was a “bundle of rods containing an axe with the blade projecting.” It was “carried before a lictor, a superior Roman magistrate, as a symbol of power over life and limb: the sticks symbolized punishment by whipping, the axe-head execution by beheading. Hence in Latin it also meant, figuratively, ‘high office, supreme power.’”

By the late 1800s, the Romans’ descendants had formed “fasci,” or “groups of men organized for political purposes.” Just a few decades later, the anti-communist partito nazionale fascista party used the 16th-century fasces as its symbol.

It is perhaps symbolic of humanity that a word used to describe connectedness and construction is so closely related to the description of a philosophy that drives division and destruction.

Fascists are, indeed, tightly bundled together. Bundling that is too tight, as with woody shrubs, limits the amount of air or water that can flow in, inviting disease and rot. In our bodies, tight fascia signal retained, unprocessed trauma. Our bodies keep the score this way. So too, arguably, our societies.

Little wonder, then, that ‘The Last of Us’ would resonate with so many gamers and viewers. By depicting mycelial connectedness as a force for destruction rather than health and support, the story highlights the threat to humanity from, well, ourselves.

What would it take to soften our social connective tissue?

We should be able to consider how to come together to solve the biggest threats of our time, but Western society hardly values feminine traits. The misogyny we see in our online and real-life spaces, in language such as “man up,” “don’t be a pussy,” or “whipped,” reflects the rejection of these traits within the individual and collective masculine.

Moreover, whether consciously or unconsciously, we’ve modeled our society on the less connective aspects of nature. Companies are born and die in infancy, or grow strong enough to be gobbled up by a bigger, stronger competitor. When they themselves do grow to be that competitor, they’re often toppled (or “disrupted”) by younger, smaller, more nimble upstarts.

Even the trees compete for light and nutrients and space, sharing resources only with their own kind through mycorrhizal networks. Forests of the same species grow to “respect” one another’s space in the canopy they form, but constant changes in climate (human-affected climate change notwithstanding) make it possible for new species to take root and, potentially, dominate.

Ultimately, it comes down to another of those yoga-mat metaphors: balance. A balancing pose requires both strength and flexibility; tight fascia can challenge bones to stack the right way, raising your risk of falling and even injury.

Again, practicing yin can help to soften the fascia, but the major challenge is emotional. The longer you hold a yin pose, the more emotion can stir up. The emotional discomfort, especially the kind associated with trauma, can be worse than the physical.

As a society, this is where we are: the discomfort of a position that reminds us how vulnerable we are. We’re stretched thin by the realizations that we’ve allowed our profit centers to poison our entire planet (the better to build still more industry around health and wellness and escape), and that in doing so, we allowed ourselves to be convinced that if only “those others” would go away, we’d all be better off.

In other words, by banding together so tightly, refusing to acknowledge our own vulnerability, we’ve weakened our connections to each other and to nature.

Movies like 1963’s ‘The Birds’ and 2008’s (admittedly execrable) ‘The Happening’ tried to warn us that we’d reap what our industrialization sowed, and we should fear it.

Less apparent has been the message that we can adapt by evolving. Even if we don’t recognize ourselves in human-vampire or humycelium iterations, our strength, for better or worse, has always lain in community.

Perhaps on some level we already know this. Labor union organizing and action is the highest it’s been in many years. Efforts to reform juvenile justice and child welfare systems center the concept of kinship care: a culturally, community oriented approach that relies on a child’s relatives or others known to them, who can soften the edges of a punitive system and reduce the chance of recidivism.

Community is also at the heart of restorative justice, which focuses on accountability for offenders rather than retributive punishment, and healing for victims and communities rather than mere survivorship.

Mycorrhizal networks may not be necessary for us to tell each other when something is wrong, what we need, or to be able to share resources with one another. We have email, text messaging, and old-fashioned phone calls for that.

But the fact remains that we do need to be able to communicate, and our communication needs to be as robust and as regular as the mycorrhizal networks’. That’s especially true as forests die — at our own hands — and the trees that sustain our lives lose the ability to take care of one another.

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