Lessons from the Valley

I was propelled to dive into deep time thinking via many encounters with both humans and non-humans during my stay in Valley of Possible, a six-week residency program in southern Chile anchored in ecological concerns. During that period, around the early 2020’s, I was deeply enthusiastic about my ongoing research on fungi and bryophyte, greatly inspired—like many others—by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Robin Wall Kimmerer. ³ I signed up for the residency particularly because it included workshops with local botanists and wildlife experts, offering field trips closely tied to these themes. I was not a stranger to the ideas of learning from other species, knowing that their incredible biological attributes, capacities, behaviors, and interactions with other beings and humans actually held far more forms of intelligence than we typically recognize. However, little did I know how much more I would continue to learn from the entangled and fermented relations, knowledge, and ideas rooted in that experience. Much of my reading and practice, both prior to and after the residency, has since been interwoven into a mycelium-like network, initiating some new fruitful fungal time—untamed, bridging, ephemeral and enduring all at once.

One of the most memorable learnings for me came from a rare occasion to visit a spiritual leader from the Mapuche community, the local indigenous tribe in the southern Andes. In the most exquisite and poetic language—woven with heartfelt chanting and countless references to his and his ancestral dreams—the machi (shaman) elaborated his introduction around the fireplace in his ruka house, “For Mapuche people, our children learn to become soil first.” ⁴

This powerful intergenerational affirmation struck me as an epiphany. My eyes were burning from the smoky air, as my mind swelled with wonder. If this had been the first lesson of my life, what kind of cosmovision would I have grown up with? Would it be all about learning from fauna and flora? Knowledge about farming or foraging? Having different kinds of kin? About reciprocity? The equality of living rights among beings? The cancellation of property ownership? The cycles of matter and life? What—and how long— does it take to form soil? Running with my train of thought with contemporary vernaculars, my mind was completely blown open as the machi contrasted this trajectory with the Western idea of the self, “Then, we learn to become we, and finally to maybe think about who I am.”

“Becoming soil” was the first deep time thinking exercise for me. Soil is never pure. Soil is all inclusive. Always be-with. It is fluid and transforming. It is the milk of mother earth. It is where death belongs. If we all learned to become soil, the world wouldn’t be full of ego, of every I roaming around to claim borders. We would be soft and softer in making offerings for others. It was one of the most queer statements I could possibly imagine, and I knew I was not just listening to the machi’s voice at that point. I was listening to them—the words from him and his ancestors, the animals sharing his territory and his dreams, the echoes in the water and the mountain around—in anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena’s word, from the “earth beings,” which refers to “a presence that blurred the known distinction between humans and nature…Emerging from these relations is a socio-natural region that participates of more than one mode of being.”⁵

On another raining morning, our guest lecturer, Pedro Drapela Morin, led us into the microscopic world of bryophyte. We sauntered into the miniature forest along the creek, and learned about their cross-species symbiotic strategy for survival and collaboration. It seems that mosses lent us some soft magic, as our sense of spatial scale shifted and our attention turned to different textures and details. After the observation session, our following conversation somehow became extremely gentle and caring—encompassing our cultures and ways of beings. It felt like a group of strangers had suddenly taken a collective leap into an abyss, engaging in soul-to-soul dialogue. Later we came up with our secret lexicon: “lichen hour”—to name those moments that we collapse and cuddle together when we feel vulnerable and depending on one another. Lichen hour was how we acknowledged our personal limits and embraced an extended body to laugh and cry within. I didn’t know lichen could teach me love until that moment revealed it.

My roommate Marit Mihklepp, an artist from Estonia, collected stones for her work. Our room was filled with volcano stones and river stones, hand-picked from the nearby canyon. On our walks around the valley, we encountered delicate frost flowers blossoming on stones I was almost lured to harvest; stones that could be opened like 3D puzzles; and stones that crumbled between our fingers. I was led to wonder, among our room display, how stone always silently dances with great force on Earth, while we are mostly busy dancing with humans. This thought led to another flash from the residency. On one of our jolly dancing nights (there wasn’t much to do in a rural farm house with no internet and light too dim to read) we were caught off guard, half naked, tipsy and red-faced, by the arrival of our guest lecturer. Milton Almonacid, a Mapuche philosophy academic and our weekly special guest, walked into the living room with his mother. We rushed to get more properly dressed and switch off the music, not knowing what kind of serious brain exercise awaited us the next morning.

Milton elaborated on how the Western idea of growth and progress, connected to the linear time notion, diminishes other temporalities, rhythms, orientations. In a full lecture supported by both historical facts and observation of our everyday practice and pursuit, he argued that this process ultimately leads to an unsustainable dead end. After presenting a comparative reading on the Mapuche notion of time, he then challenged us to consider what we would be willing to give up—if we could live with less than what we were born with—and engaged us in the workshop exercise focused on “de-growth,” rather than accumulation and efficiency in our lives. It was not an easy exercise, but rather a hard punch that forced us to delve into our everyday politics and life purpose. How do we quench our relentless desire for more, and for normative social establishment? I did not and could not acquire any easy answers. However, during that six-week residency in the colorful autumn, I was repeatedly prompted to contemplate how I might synchronize my rhythm with other beings, instead of following standard Greenwich time. I learned it from fungi, lichen, stone, celestial bodies and my new Mapuche friends. I learned it from my loved ones, in multiple forms.