From Emergence Magazine

 My Sunday newsletter offers a glimpse from the pages of this wonderful journal. This week there's an interesting conversation. I'll give the first few paragraphs, and you can follow the link (I hope.)

“Life fades into nonlife so gradually that it’s actually hard to locate a border, let alone police one.” — Merlin Sheldrake

What are the bounds of a self? Is a single redwood in a forest separate from its fellow beings, from the ferns and bats that inhabit its branches, the mycelial web underfoot? What about the lichen encrusting its bark, itself a composite of algal cells living among fungal filaments? Can we imagine a subjectivity for the wider forest ecosystem, the collection of selves that make it up? How might we define these entities’ agencies, interests, or rights?  Honoring the Wild Proliferation of Earthly Perspectives with Merlin Sheldrake and David Abram In this conversation, cultural ecologist David Abram and mycologist Merlin Sheldrake explore the many kinds of selves that make up our world and reimagine the frameworks through which we define their rights and well-being. Published in partnership with the More Than Human Rights (MOTH) Project, Merlin and David’s discussion ventures past the realm of the known, entering a playful space of possibility that recognizes the inseparability of the fluxing multitudes that compose—and decompose—the biosphere. DAVID ABRAM:  "...We were all drawn together by our bodacious love and concern for the wider and much wilder community of earthly agencies, for the whole cantankerous collective of what you so aptly call “entangled life.” And this made for a very convivial gathering indeed, surging with reflective insights and conundrums, but one that also held space for grief—the grief that most of us were carrying in relation to the vast and unprecedented losses in the human and more-than-human community—and also for some music-making. Each of these are necessary ingredients for any sort of wisdom—for thinking, that is, not just with our abstract intellects, but with the whole of our creaturely selves, reflecting with the entirety of our feelingful, intelligent organisms. Our sensate bodies, after all, provide our sole access to all these other animals, to the plants and the fungi, to the rainforests, the rivers, the surging winds and the gathering storms. MERLIN SHELDRAKE: I found this convergence enormously inspiring. I was left with a sense that interdisciplinarity is a superpower. This is a recurring theme in the history of life: by coming together, radically different organisms can extend their reach and achieve things that none of the individual players—whether bacterium, alga, fungus, animal, plant—could achieve by themselves. Lichens are wonderful examples of this. When a volcano creates a new island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the first things to grow on the bare rock are lichens, which arrive as spores or fragments carried by the wind or birds—likewise when a glacier retreats. Whenever it was that lichens occurred for the first time, their very existence implies that life outside the lichen was less bearable...."  Here's the link to the whole conversation: https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/honoring-the-wild-proliferation-of-earthly-perspectives/?utm_source=Emergence+Magazine&utm_campaign=fe3a5842d5-WildProliferations%E2%80%9420240218&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73186f6259-fe3a5842d5-357088886