Martina

“Iwígara channels the idea that all life, spiritual and physical, is interconnected in a continual cycle [and] expresses the belief that all life shares the same breath. We are all related to, and play a role in, the complexity of life.” Knowing that I am related to everything around me and share breath with all living things helps me to focus on my responsibility to honor all forms of life. Or, as native writer N. Scott Momaday puts it, everything around us has “being-ness.”
― Enrique Salmon, Iwigara: The Kinship of Plants and People: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science

“A slime-mold enthusiast told me about a test he had performed. He frequently got lost in IKEA stores and would spend many minutes trying to find the exit. He decided to challenge his slime molds with the same problem and built a maze based on the floor plan of his local IKEA. Sure enough, without any signs or staff to direct them, the slime molds soon found the shortest path to the exit. “You see,” he said with a laugh, “they’re cleverer than me.”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

“90 percent of the serotonin in our bodies—the neurotransmitter that when abundant makes us feel happy, and when depleted makes us feel depressed—is produced in our guts, and gut microbes play a major role in regulating its production (Yano et al. 2015).”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

“A growing number of studies have made a link between animal behavior and the trillions of bacteria and fungi that live in their guts, many of which produce chemicals that influence animal nervous systems. The interaction between gut microbes and brains—the “microbiome-gut-brain axis”—is far-reaching enough to have birthed a new field: neuromicrobiology.”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures