Mycorrhizal

Invisible circulation through living relationship. Support moving where it is needed without waiting to be commanded, priced, or praised.

The Feeling

You kneel in forest soil and push your fingers into the duff. Beneath the surface — beneath the roots you can see — there is a web you cannot. White threads finer than hair, connecting every tree to every other tree in a network older than any human language. A mother Douglas fir is feeding a shaded seedling thirty meters away, sending carbon through this web without being asked, without keeping score. The seedling lives because the network lives.

Put your ear to the ground. You will not hear it. But it is speaking.

What Nature Teaches

Suzanne Simard proved what indigenous peoples always knew: the forest is one organism. Mycorrhizal fungi connect ninety percent of land plants into a communication network that shares nutrients, sends chemical distress signals, and allocates resources by need rather than merit. When a tree is dying, it dumps its carbon into the network — a final gift. When a seedling is struggling, the mother tree increases the flow.

There is no central command. No coordination. No one decides who deserves resources. The network senses gradients and responds. Surplus flows toward the thinnest place the way water flows downhill — not because someone ordered it, but because that is what networks do when they are healthy.

How It Lives Here

The mycorrhizal network is the model for how communities connect to each other. Regular communication with at least five other communities. Traveling members who carry learnings between nodes like spores in the wind. Shared platforms — digital mycelium — for sensing what each node needs and what each has in surplus.

The rule is simple: send what you have to where it is needed, without being asked. Food, skills, people, attention. Let the gradient do the work. Trust the network more than the plan.

The Questions That Live Here

These are questions to ask beneath the visible surface:

• What is the human equivalent of the mycorrhizal network — and is it already running beneath our awareness?
• How do you build invisible support structures that function without being managed?
• What happens when the network is severed — and how does it heal?