February Archive Highlight - Feel Your Roots

This month, rather than digging deep into the archive of past projects, we’re going to look at the topsoil of a curious project that just recently came across my plate.

Image from “The ecological relations of roots” by John Ernest Weaver, 1919. Courtesy Wikimedia

Since 2022, I’ve been consulting for, collaborating with, and occasionally performing with Temple of The Stranger, an inclusive, alternative, mystical Jewish community in North Brooklyn led by Rav Jericho. Jericho and I first connected after their experience of Undersigned, which led them to generously initiate a conversation around Spiritual Theater. I initially felt some surprise and even vulnerability having my work placed in that category - long time readers know I tend to be very cautious about what promises I make to participants with the language of my invitations - but through conversations with Jericho I came to be fascinated by the spaces of overlap in our practice, and deeply grateful to see the depth and richness of their own practice. Ultimately I love to be in conversation with professionals across the spectrum of care, and having attended both sides of several events at the Temple of The Stranger, it’s been a real pleasure to see those traditions and innovations of care take root.

So when Jericho approached me about exploring different interactive meditations for a Tu BiShvat observation this year at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, I jumped at the chance. In previous years Jericho had built an experience meditating on a traditional story about wise men in the garden of paradise, but this year wanted to ground more concretely in the wisdom of trees. And so I set about exploring a half-remembered story I’d once heard reported about the interconnectivity of trees through their root systems. Along the way I leaned heavily on our reading this month, Merlin Sheldrake, and on musician, composer and “living, breathing aug7 chord“ Josh Davidoff, who had previously provided sound design to help deepen audience experiences for Undersigned (if you have experienced Undersigned and find yourself surprised to hear there was sound design, that’s because Josh did his job so well you couldn’t notice it).

The result was a first draft in what’s intended to be an ongoing exploration of auditory immersive works. I’ve thrown a few excerpts below, which I invite you to explore with a little auditory accompaniment. As someone who has been working with small audiences for about 5 years now, it was somewhat strange to return to even a group of 30 or so. Still, I’ve been increasingly facilitating workshops for organizations like Monument Lab, and so am finding an interesting balance between designing for the group body and designing for the listener behind closed eyes.


If you haven’t already, go ahead and hit play now on that audio to hear a sample of the beautiful soundscape that Josh Davidoff put together to underscore all this tree talk (and then head over to his Band Camp to explore more of his work!)

The groups began standing in small circles of 3-5 people, distributed through the space; once we'd made our circle of circles, I started to lead the activity as Josh scored us with the sound cues he had built

In his book “Entangled,” the Biologist Merlin Sheldrake talks at one point about his challenges as a scientist permitting himself to use and engage his imagination. I found it an interesting tension, and I’d like us all to give ourselves the same grace today, to use science for the next 15 minutes or so as an invitation to imagination.

As we study today at the feet of trees, we’re going to try an exercise to understand a story that lies in the roots beneath them. To start, let’s imagine every one of these small circles you are standing in to be a tree.

And to imagine what happens inside the tree, we’re going to be holding hands and sending pulses by squeezing - if for any reason you don’t want to hold hands with others today, you can hold opposite ends of one of these branches instead, and give a little tug instead of squeezing to make your pulse. And to play this game, we just need one rule: if you feel a pulse in one hand, send a pulse with the other [...]

The groups within each circle practiced this together, holding hands and sending pulses as we discussed photosynthesis, and imagined leaves taking in sunlight, converting light energy into chemical energy, and then passing those sugar and lipids throughout the tree. We then scrambled the hands we were holding, closing our eyes and making the clean circles into tangled webs, and used similar exercises to discuss the way roots take in water, and the transfer of that water from cells with to cells without.

But when we really get down into the roots of trees, and in fact in the roots of 90% of plants, we find something else there - fungi. The mushrooms that we know and see are just the fruit hanging from a larger unseen canopy - webs of mycorrhizal structures, branching and reaching in all directions. Each sprouting, searching tip of the fungi is called a hypha - and where it finds organic matter and minerals, the hypha releases enzymes, and breaks them down into nutrients. And where these hyphae find other hyphae or the roots of a tree, they clasp hands, and form a network. That union is called anastomosis - which in Greek means to provide with a mouth. In this embrace, they feed each other. Up above the tree converts the sunlight into sugar, and sends as much as 30% to the fungi, and below the fungi the draws water and nutrients from the earth and passes it back to the tree.

Two organisms working in mutually beneficial harmony is called symbiosis - and the tree  and the fungi have danced like this for many millions of years. It is believed the earliest plants did not have roots at all, and depended on fungi to serve that role until the plants evolved to grow roots of their own. But the fungi and the tree have a much more complicated arrangement than a mere duet. The fungi are promiscuous, with still more Hypha reaching out, pushing unseeing through the soil, to make connections with multiple trees, different species of plants, even with other fungi. [...]

At this point I tapped participants on the edge of each circle and had them drop one hand hold and quest out with eyes still shut to connect to a neighboring circle.  Delightful, clumsy chaos ensued, and eventually settled (with some light facilitator prompting) into one large, interconnected circuit. We discussed the instances of “humongous fungus'' where individual fungi grow to enormous scale, connecting entire forests of plants together to shoulder both abundance and lack. We then began to play with sending signal cascades radiating out in different directions, squeezing hands to detect and pass lived experiences we’d had in the past year: who got a sunburn? who swam in the ocean? who experienced a first kiss? was adjacent to new life? to death?

The biologist Merlin Sheldrake has said that studying these mycorrhizal networks can complicate our ideas of what an individual is - the interconnectedness of the entities in the network blurs notions of independence. And by putting ourselves at the level of the cascade of signals, we can imagine care and love as a presence, as a nutrient, passed hand over hand, through a larger body. And perhaps as the hands pulse and pulse in the network, we almost imagine what is transferred as its own entity - ourselves not as the subject, but as the transport through which something larger moves through the world.

But in our day to day, as people, we cannot witness the whole system. We are only present to each moment of exchange. [...]

We then released one hand to shift into pairs, thinking about people in our own network who had lifted and support us, and people we wanted to commit to giving support to. Finally, released the other hand and stood alone.

Even now you are a network. The majority of the cells in your body are not you - bacteria and fungi form an entire ecosystem of cells within you. There are more bacteria in your gut alone than stars in our galaxy. Take a breath in -

oxygen is absorbed by the leaves of your lungs, and it is spread throughout many branches and roots of your body. The signals cascade, each cell takes what it needs, and passes forward what it can. Something is moving through you. Breath out.

Carbon. Another exchange

Open your eyes.