Missing Witches - We Are Lichen Kin

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the spring season of the Missing Witches podcast, our kinship season, which is

00:00:06.140 dedicated to getting familiar with our familiars. This is where we take time to learn from our more

00:00:12.480 than human kin. In the fall, we'll do a season dedicated to people's stories again, our classic

00:00:19.100 Missing Witches stories, and throughout the summer, we'll have witches found interviews and episodes

00:00:23.660 of the Rx. Our list of people and of songs and other media to learn from about craft and magic

00:00:30.360 and resistance and re-enchantment is long and fertile. But in the spring, we need to balance

00:00:36.760 out against people logic by digging into soil, learning about the plants and animals and rocks

00:00:43.400 and winds and waters that are us too, as we wind our wild ways through the hollow biont that we

00:00:49.500 all are here on earth. These episodes were originally conceived of as tongue-in-cheek

00:00:55.380 anti-capitalist motivational meditations, and we hope you'll take these offerings in that

00:01:00.360 original sense. Seed bombs hurled on the pristine dying lawns of Mondays. Bless it fucking be.

00:01:09.320 Oh, and quickly, before we begin, I want to thank Tasha Lavdowski for allowing us to share 0.98

00:01:15.980 their music in this episode. The lichens of the Sook Hills Wilderness Park are the source of the

00:01:22.280 chemical data set that has been translated into piano music for the project Music for Lichens,

00:01:28.600 created with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

00:01:31.040 pearly everlasting is white and frail heal all is low and humble with tiny cups of blue

00:01:47.620 lupin or violet or coral all summer long they sip nitrogen from the air and pour nourishment back

00:01:55.260 into starving soil graceful as they flock together along the roadside waving their arms in welcome

00:02:10.780 poppies are red and unexpected in the wildflower tangle

00:02:17.900 they must have been planted decades ago by the old woman who raised her kids here before me

00:02:22.780 one red flag flower with its black heart stands up from the shadows each year

00:02:28.660 somewhere near the granite boulder where I mark the body part I grew

00:02:32.280 then buried then covered with stone to remind myself and the kid I grew up for

00:02:37.520 that this is home this is where our blood lives and the poppy comes because she knows things about

00:02:44.460 memory. And all along the paths, and caught in the cold branches, making tiny nests of melt

00:02:56.340 in the snowbanks, aleatory lichen appear like the tangles of blowing green.

00:03:02.380 alictoria okroluca two-toned witch's hair alictoria means unmarried this lichen is an

00:03:15.080 epiphyte rootless it travels and lives on air and rain alictoria is also the name of a talisman

00:03:23.120 stone believed to be found in the belly of an elderly cockerel or rooster a stone that would

00:03:29.200 have been rubbed smooth by the daily grind of helping the bird digest grain. Alectoria okraluca

00:03:36.820 appeared everywhere before me this winter, like tiny tangled messages, and I loved them long

00:03:43.580 before I looked them up and learned their name. Witch's hair, brave and wild, their tiny arms

00:03:51.560 outstretched, offering, like most things here, a secret medicine. It's been a gray winter,

00:04:01.260 a winter we've heard war drums and children asking why on the wind that keens and grieves

00:04:07.340 and rages through the trees. I've been sitting in the snow, resting my head against the white

00:04:14.040 birch, remembering wildflowers, counting them off like a rosary, willing them to return.

00:04:21.560 and letting my eyes follow lichen like a cipher to solve,

00:04:26.180 or a map to the hope that might be buried here beneath the snow.

00:04:31.060 Quote,

00:04:31.780 Lichens grow in the leftover spots of the natural world

00:04:34.920 that are too harsh or limited for most other organisms.

00:04:39.200 They are pioneers on bare rock, desert sand, cleared soil, dead wood,

00:04:46.180 animal bones, rusty metal, and living bark,

00:04:49.340 able to shut down metabolically during periods of unfavorable conditions.

00:04:55.020 They can survive extremes of heat, cold, and drought.

00:04:59.520 As they advance over years across barren landscapes,

00:05:02.660 light can take tiny pieces from the surfaces they read like braille.

00:05:07.180 They draw minerals into themselves, but they also leave tiny greens behind.

00:05:11.920 And from that patch of soil, so small, moss grows,

00:05:16.100 and then ferns and the forest returns they draw a map of tiny choices of the ways we are weathered

00:05:25.820 by life of what it costs and about where abundance comes from

00:05:32.120 When I'm lost in the injustice and cruelty of the human world, I lose myself in lichen.

00:05:48.720 They survive the winter and climb the trees and whisper life stories into ancient rocks.

00:05:55.040 Lichen, like whales, soak all our toxins in to testify on behalf of the world

00:06:02.660 From the corner of my eye, they are tiny, moving ferns

00:06:07.940 Carrying algae tucked within themselves

00:06:10.480 Bringing water to wastelands

00:06:13.220 Believing in tomorrow, even when I can't 0.55

00:06:20.100 Lichens are fungi that have discovered agriculture

00:06:23.080 wrote lichenologist Trevor Goward

00:06:25.880 and while I love to think of them discovering

00:06:29.300 this metaphor missed the truth of what fungi do

00:06:33.120 when becoming lichen

00:06:34.820 which is that they invite the other in

00:06:37.800 they don't farm somewhere outside themselves

00:06:41.620 and they don't torch the land beneath them

00:06:43.840 with pesticides to mass produce a monocrop

00:06:46.620 instead in the very walls and halls of their own bodies

00:06:51.820 they make space and safe harbor for collaborative creation

00:06:57.140 which is we are like in kin i know you i have seen you keeping seeds and water and hope and

00:07:10.980 life and laughter and resistance carefully encircled in your hearts protected by your

00:07:18.940 stories, your craft, your rituals, your punk songs, your ancestors, your wild gods, etc.

00:07:28.920 I have heard you singing the silent songs that like and sing. I know your bodies testify.

00:07:37.680 I know you trace pathways through barren places. I know you. You keep faith with the future of the

00:07:47.400 world. Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote, the algal partner is a collection of single

00:07:59.220 cells gleaming like emeralds and bearing the gift of photosynthesis, the precious

00:08:05.380 alchemy of turning light and air to sugar. The alga is an autotroph or one

00:08:15.000 makes its own food and will be the cook in the family, the producer. The alga can

00:08:20.680 make all the sugar it needs for energy but it's not very good at finding

00:08:24.260 minerals it needs. It can only photosynthesize when it's moist and it

00:08:28.600 has no ability to protect itself from drying. The fungus partner is the

00:08:34.120 heterotroph or other feeder since it can't make its own food but must

00:08:39.180 subsist on the carbon harvested by the other. The fungus is brilliant at the

00:08:44.500 art of dissolving things and liberating their minerals for its use. But it can't make sugar.

00:08:52.040 End quote. 0.56

00:08:58.860 Different species of fungi have preferred algae partners. They form communities over a long time.

00:09:07.080 They balance each other out. They step in to help where the other is lacking.

00:09:14.500 the algae isn't just a companion on a fungal journey it enters the fungi so

00:09:25.060 completely that together the two beings make a third thing they are symbionts

00:09:34.600 across kingdoms. They choose each other and survive.

00:09:43.560 Who do you choose to go about this work of believing in the future together?

00:09:49.000 Do you feel encircled? Are you making sweetness at the heart of your commingling?

00:09:54.600 Are you nourishing each other?

00:10:01.280 Are you listening to the rock and the wind?

00:10:05.720 Are you being changed?

00:10:15.200 Kimmerer continues.

00:10:17.660 The fungal-algeal symbiosis so blurs the distinction between individual and community

00:10:23.300 that it has attracted a great deal of research attention.

00:10:27.600 Some pairs are so specialized that they cannot live apart from one another.

00:10:32.340 Nearly 20,000 species of fungus are known to occur

00:10:35.220 only as obligate members of a lichen symbiosis.

00:10:39.360 Others have the capacity to live freely yet choose to join an alga to become a lichen.

00:10:47.580 I hope you are choosing freely

00:10:49.620 and conjuring modular shapes of care and aid that work for you and yours.

00:10:57.180 And also, I'm willing to open up my ideas about individualism and free will

00:11:03.020 in light of lichen insights.

00:11:10.740 Deep within my belly, there is a tiny web of life called mycobiome.

00:11:15.400 And though they make up less than 1% of the metropolis that is my gut microbiome,

00:11:20.900 research is showing that they are the sorters, the bus drivers, the chief operations officers,

00:11:26.680 the translators, the traders who make transfers more successful.

00:11:32.180 I am like a lichen in this way. 0.89

00:11:34.980 Fungi have wrapped their thin arms to embrace me from the inside.

00:11:44.660 When I stop and listen to my gut, my instincts, my nameless fears, or to the desire that comes 0.97

00:11:53.640 from somewhere inside that demands I go outside, I imagine channeling the different wisdoms

00:12:00.860 of the beings that live in me, that know how to talk to water and to trees.

00:12:06.620 I put my hand on my belly and ask them, what do we need?

00:12:14.660 quote the symbiotic co-evolution of human and gut bacteria has shaped the morphology and behavior

00:12:26.400 of both humans and gut bacteria neither is viable without the other human gut microbiota have

00:12:34.600 evolved to live in the specific environment of the human gut while humans have evolved to depend

00:12:40.260 upon food that could not be fully digested without this specific internal symbiotic community.

00:12:47.260 What becomes clear from this perspective is interconnectedness in an ecological mesh.

00:12:54.380 We aren't alone in here. You are not alone, ever. You live with beings who came from the

00:13:03.160 civilization inside your mother's body and who chose to migrate to be with you.

00:13:08.320 You live with beings who had colonies on the surfaces of the outside world

00:13:12.200 and chose a safer, more nourishing home with you.

00:13:15.540 And now they help you extract minerals and sugars from the plants you consume.

00:13:20.640 This is an alliance that goes back millennia.

00:13:25.020 Your belly is full of talismanic stones.

00:13:29.120 Right at the heart of each of our cells, there is evidence of our ancestral alchemy.

00:13:33.660 quote so how is a human like a lichen every human cell has a bacterial power source

00:13:44.560 much like the lichen's reliance on its photobiont mitochondria are organelles within the eukaryotic

00:13:52.460 cell that have distinct dna and are involved in the production of adenosine triphosphate

00:13:58.260 a source of chemical energy. Further, as Margulis suggested in 1967, eukaryotic cells were once

00:14:07.480 non-nucleated prokaryotes that survived absorption by another cell. Mitochondria thus provide animal

00:14:16.960 cells with energy in much the same way as a photobion provides photosynthetic energy to the

00:14:22.140 lichen." Your very cells work the way they do because of interspecies

00:14:32.340 collaboration. I consider you witch kin if you can see or sense or imagine the 1.00

00:14:45.080 web around us. All these invisible fine lines of relationality, the ways we are 1.00

00:14:52.820 entwined and tangled with the world. Close your eyes and imagine the lines of

00:15:01.940 flight, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, those old theory witches. Between you and

00:15:09.140 and your symbionts, and all the species and spirits

00:15:12.560 in the room with you now.

00:15:15.920 Count them out like a litany, like a heathen liturgy.

00:15:26.060 Walnut, pine, birch, teak, mahogany ghosts

00:15:31.840 are here in the desk, the chair, the door frames.

00:15:36.400 In the distance you can hear their leaves rustling,

00:15:39.840 their roots whispering to their children

00:15:42.020 and their mothers through fungal webs.

00:15:46.140 Clay and silica and the earth they came from

00:15:49.280 and the hands that shaped and carried them are here too.

00:15:54.900 Linen, cotton, wool, sheep bleeding,

00:16:00.160 blades cutting through sheaves,

00:16:02.480 Dyes and paints and ruffled circles of chemists around petri dishes.

00:16:11.720 Dried roses for my sister's wedding, that day we sang together.

00:16:16.860 We joined hands with strangers becoming family.

00:16:20.280 We smoked a joint with the groom's great aunt.

00:16:23.320 We danced.

00:16:27.440 Follow the materials, to the stories, to the sisters.

00:16:32.900 Call up the web. 0.89

00:16:38.020 Remember the witch's hair, though rootless and unmarried, 0.95

00:16:41.500 is part of how the web is. 0.96

00:16:45.580 They sip water from the air.

00:16:47.580 They take flight and nest in snow or trees or pathways.

00:16:53.800 They make a pact with the unseen.

00:17:00.620 See your own spine in your mind's eye.

00:17:06.280 Imagine the flickering light that moves

00:17:08.220 between your belly and your brain

00:17:09.800 as you call to mind this web.

00:17:16.580 Imagine your nervous system extending out to your edges,

00:17:19.940 intelligent strings of nerves like hyphae reach your skin

00:17:25.900 and then imagine them pushing beyond,

00:17:29.620 following the lines of relation,

00:17:32.720 of kinship, of interconnection around you

00:17:36.560 and way beyond the limits of your body.

00:17:41.440 See yourself like a spider in a web.

00:17:44.360 And now imagine you take one thread in your hand and at the end of the thread imagine

00:17:57.740 a bit of living blue-green, an emerald fragment of the fabric of the earth that is unmoored

00:18:10.100 lonely, rootless. There have been holes opened in our ecosystems. In some places

00:18:22.560 the web is in tatters. But we are like in kin. We invite the other in. Imagine the

00:18:35.820 great spider of your sensing with its many fine delicate arms reaching into the ecosystems families

00:18:41.800 cultures stories social and political systems around you and gathering up the lost ones

00:18:49.860 seeing treasure in the discarded and suffering pulling threads nodding binding quilting

00:19:00.400 ourselves deeply, carefully, into the mesh of the many who live, who honor life

00:19:07.060 everywhere it still flourishes and clings to hope.

00:19:13.640 We are Lycan kin.

00:19:20.700 We have survived crises together before.

00:19:25.340 Kimmerer again.

00:19:31.920 Only with severe need did the hyphae curl around the algae.

00:19:37.840 Only when the algae was stressed did it welcome the advances.

00:19:42.780 When times are easy and there's plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone.

00:19:47.560 but when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous

00:19:55.180 it takes a team sworn to reciprocity

00:19:58.900 to keep life going forward

00:20:01.200 in a world of scarcity

00:20:06.220 interconnection and mutual aid

00:20:08.520 become critical for survival

00:20:10.600 so say the lichens

00:20:13.800 end quote

00:20:15.080 we are listening lichens and we feel the weight of scarcity artificially imposed upon a deeply

00:20:26.100 fertile earth by corporations agglomerated into legal individuals with more rights than kids

00:20:32.040 or rivers or ancient trees or the communities they extract from turning life force into cold

00:20:39.300 ones and zeros tick ticking and accumulating for the few who are starving too

00:20:44.840 Though they don't know it yet

00:20:46.680 Their microbiomes probably do

00:20:50.300 We are here in the dark again

00:20:56.680 In the coven we make between our ears

00:20:59.380 We are a team sworn to reciprocity

00:21:04.360 To keep life going forward

00:21:14.840 reaching across barren places to take hands,

00:21:19.820 crafting our covens of mutual aid.

00:21:28.240 Like in our fungi who opened themselves,

00:21:30.960 they showed spaces of themselves that were vulnerable,

00:21:33.820 and they sang a song of welcome, of loneliness, of adventure.

00:21:37.180 and the algae heard them calling came up out of the water curled up inside the safe home of their

00:21:47.520 singing hosts together they built layer upon layer of collaborative survival structures

00:21:57.680 to give each other the basics of life together they can reproduce with a love that is not love

00:22:04.300 making a fertility that sketches new appendages into the distance instead of making babies

00:22:10.320 quote reproduction in lichens may be either sexual or vegetative asexual in asexual

00:22:23.960 reproduction fragments of the thalus containing both the photobion and the mycobion separate

00:22:29.360 and form into a new lichen, end quote.

00:22:41.700 In becoming lichen, fungi and algae change each other,

00:22:46.000 and then they grow new limbs made up of their layered selves,

00:22:49.500 and then they release those limb children

00:22:51.560 who carry on with their people's work

00:22:53.560 of bringing water, air, sugar, minerals to barren places.

00:23:00.360 Life everywhere expands beyond the one over-storied path of male-female sexual reproduction. 0.94

00:23:13.980 That's part of what we mean when we say witchcraft is a fertility cult.

00:23:22.120 Doreen Valiente, poet, spy, co-founder of Wicca, said,

00:23:26.820 the idea of fertility is something that goes much deeper than the hope for good crops and increase

00:23:32.580 of livestock and I'm sure that it always did there is a spiritual as well as a material fertility

00:23:39.300 there is the need for people to be alive and vital and creative life is here to be enjoyed

00:23:47.160 not just endured

00:23:48.680 take my hand and let's run together towards those words for everyone you deserve a delicious life

00:24:03.060 and i do too and i promise to work and revel and rest in honor of our mutual liberation

00:24:18.680 I promise to work and revel and rest in honor of our mutual liberation.

00:24:30.820 I promise to work and revel and rest in honor of our mutual liberation.

00:24:38.820 I promise. 1.00

00:24:40.220 Witches, bad bitches, feminists, lichen listeners, pariah prophets as trans-indigenous theorists 1.00

00:24:55.700 and decolonial diviner Christopher Marmolejo summons us, we are a fertility cult. 1.00

00:25:03.100 We are devotees of survival and delight.

00:25:10.220 We are here for a sexual liberation that includes my grandmother burning her bra and also all acts of consensual love and pleasure, and also our completely asexual means of joyfully stretching ourselves into the world, becoming entangled with it such that we cross thresholds and carry love and the life principle into barren places.

00:25:34.600 we are a fertility cult dedicated to the whole spectrum singing out from this freaky fecund

00:25:42.360 planet and just like lichen when we cast a spell or create a work of art or research

00:25:48.880 we are infused and entangled by our influences the mesh of conversations we make a limb that

00:25:56.540 holds all of ourselves and countless seeds of others also and then we find a way to step away

00:26:02.560 detach and send it off on its own living its own pathways working its own magic in the world

00:26:09.340 we are like in kin we are ready to be decolonized from within we are on the margins in the woods

00:26:20.900 in the hollowing echoing places inside fungi whispering come in come in

00:26:28.260 in queer theory for lichens david griffiths writes quote lichens are not anomalies but

00:26:40.360 are rather illustrative of the fact that life and nature are found if anywhere in the complex

00:26:47.000 and queer cobbling together of multi-species relationships end quote fungi and algae or 0.51

00:26:55.840 cyanobacteria join in a queer cobbling together that is and has always been at the heart of the

00:27:02.400 mysteries of life. The spiraling of forces, natural or divine, choose the metaphor that

00:27:08.460 gets you closest. Either way, they pledge their allegiance to a reciprocity that keeps life going

00:27:14.680 forward.

00:27:19.040 And now they walk.

00:27:22.000 Sometimes they walk like witch's hair, blowing green, untethered, unleashed, a leaping dance.

00:27:29.600 Sometimes they walk in concentric ruffles across rock faces.

00:27:34.200 Sometimes they walk in braille messages for those who might come someday with the hands

00:27:39.000 to read.

00:27:45.580 They walk to bare places, exposed and raw,

00:27:49.360 to harsh expanses of ice-scraped granite,

00:27:52.000 to places of death where nothing else can grow.

00:27:55.140 And there, they write their stories.

00:28:14.680 Robin Wall Kimmerer again, one more time, of course.

00:28:22.880 Producers and decomposers, the light and the darkness, the givers and receivers wrapped

00:28:30.400 in each other's arms, the warp and the weft of the same blanket so closely woven that

00:28:36.740 it's impossible to discern the giving from the taking.

00:28:39.740 these ancients carry teachings in the ways that they live

00:28:44.460 they remind us of the enduring power that arises from mutualism

00:28:49.700 from the sharing of the gifts carried by each species

00:28:54.420 balanced reciprocity has enabled them to flourish under the most stressful of conditions

00:29:01.480 end quote

00:29:03.320 which is we take our teachings from these ancient beings

00:29:12.600 which is we reach into the enduring power that arises from mutualism

00:29:21.080 we are like and kin

00:29:24.140 imagine them coming to you with their silent songs

00:29:30.340 map lichen walking up your tired spine

00:29:36.160 stigmatae lichen marking your palms

00:29:43.500 reindeer lichen migrating through your bloodstream 0.93

00:29:50.920 and witch's hair blowing wild around you always 0.96

00:29:57.380 reaching into the unseen.

00:30:09.940 Imagine your kin are speaking to you from within.

00:30:18.600 We are ancient.

00:30:27.380 We know the secrets of enduring power.

00:30:36.900 We are not alone. 1.00

00:30:38.820 You must be a witch. 1.00

Missing Witches - March 28, 2024

We Are Lichen Kin

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