Trees and symbiotes
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I've finally been getting around to reading The
Hidden Life of Trees, now that my partner Tor
has finished it.

They'd told me a lot of fun things about the
book but there's also a lot more that it's
making me churn a lot.

One of the things I keep getting stuck on is the
relationship between trees and fungi, where yes
there are some fungi that are very dangerous to
trees there's also symbiotic fungi that help
trees handle their root system, nutrient
extraction, and sending signals to other trees
underground.

It's fascinating right because it sounds like a
lot like our relationship to our microbiome and
all the bacteria in our gut, since the same way
there are a lot of bacteria that are quite
dangerous for us there are some that make our
resource management even possible.

I think about the line from the Danny Schmidt
song This Too Shall Pass "we pretend that this
collection has a name and is a being", because
that's one of the things that's so strange to
think about: we are a conscious thing that moves
and acts and thinks and feels but we are also
the aggregate of countless things each alive on
their own, not just thing like the microbiome
but every cell in us is /alive/ in real way.

What does that mean for this thing I call "I"?