fruiting bodies

Lobaria pulmonaria/Sonya Renee Taylor

This is Lobaria pulmonaria, aka lungwort. This one lives in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest.

It looks like delicious aquatic lettuce but lichens still aren’t plants

We haven’t gone into lichen reproduction yet but we need a quick primer to fully appreciate this one. So: some lichen reproduce sexually, via meiosis of the fungal partner, which puts out “fruiting bodies” called ascomata. These fungal bits must encounter some alga in order to actually make more lichen. Lichen also reproduce asexually, vegetatively, through mitosis, where the sun-into-sugaring alga and the living-wherever fungi both come along in a tiny propagule, which can just start growing. And some lichen do BOTH! Just reproducing every which way, and why not. Lobaria pulmonaria starts off reproducing vegetatively, but when one gets to be 25 years old or so, it makes fruiting bodies too. This lichen can always spread on its own; it develops capacity to depend on partners to spread even more. The feeling is: mutual!

While we are resisting oppressive systems and developing capacity to depend, we are also in our bodies! For liberatory visions and embodied joy, I often look to Sonya Renee Taylor, who wrote The Body is Not an Apology You can hear her with Prentis Hemphill on the Finding Our Way podcast here. She’s doing radical movement Zoom dance parties Mon-Wed at 3p ET and Fri at 5p ET, here. I love Dance Church Go so much as a source of bodily joy, but I also need opportunities to dance with and look at people as deliciously jiggly as me, and I am so grateful for what SRT creates in the world.

Lately I’ve been practicing bringing more of my actual, jiggly me to mutuality, and sometimes it’s weird. We are chatting-friendly with the older man who lives across the street, but recently he started commenting on my appearance and … no. Maybe three weeks ago I said: “you know, I don’t actually want to hear about whether I ‘look good’.” I named some real hopes: to be kind, and to be a good neighbor. He listened but seemed flummoxed. And though we usually wave every day, I didn’t see him again, at all, for a while, and I thought: well ok. That may have been…it? But then he reappeared! I’d been needing to ask him about his wood chipper for a neighborhood fruit tree pruning project, and during that chat he said the cold had been keeping him inside. This weekend, other neighbors and I pruned apple and pear trees, and he collected the branches and hauled them home to chip them. Maybe he had been hiding; who knows. Those squat trees are now invitingly climbable, and hopefully going to produce tons more delicious fruit, and my neighbor has shifted his praise to my pruning skills, and I’ll take it.

How about you? You can reply to send me an email, or leave a comment, or text your friends, about what you are practicing, or what is helping you along, or what is weird, or who you love to dance with <3.

+offer update: if you told me you want to read Bree Picower’s book but didn’t yet get an email from me about it, please tell me again, using this. Some people’s email replies don’t seem to come through! Boo!