Giuliana Furci
And that’s where I saw for the first time, it’s the first time I saw fungi. It’s not that I hadn’t seen them, but it’s that we saw each other. And there was a very beautiful orange mushroom on a tree stump, and I wanted to know who she was. And there were no books. And it was just this immediate sense of, I’m gonna do this. This is what I have to do. And that feeling has never stopped. And it only grows and grows and grows. And it’s just, you know, something came over me in that moment, I suppose, and it’s just been a responsibility that is not escapable.
Elizabeth Rovere
When we think of transcendence, we tend to imagine something exalted or above us. But I’ve come to recognize that transcendence can unfold underground, revealed in the soil beneath our feet. My guest today is Giuliana Furci, a self-taught mycologist who has spent years studying mushrooms in the wild. In this conversation, Giuliana shares for the first time the way she is documenting stories about indigenous elders and their deeply respectful and sacred relationships with fungi. I’m Elizabeth Rovere, psychologist, yoga teacher, and a pilgrim in the realms of wonder. This is Wonderstruck, a podcast about awe in all its forms. The beautiful, the humbling, and the uncanny. Together with thinkers and seekers, we explore the moments that undo us and awaken us to the very mystery of being. Oh, and one more thing. We’ve just launched a Wonderstruck newsletter on Substack. It’s where we share episode updates and a little extra wondering between shows. This month, we’ll also be seeing highlights from the truly phenomenal Telluride Mushroom Festival. You’ll find the link in the episode description. We’d love for you to join us there. And now onto the show. Welcome to Wonderstruck, and I’m sitting here today with Giuliana Furci. And we have a morel with us here today as well. Giuliana, would you like to introduce our morel?
Giuliana Furci
Well, it’s a lovely Morchella species from Massachusetts. I’d never met her before. She’s lovely.
Elizabeth Rovere
Fantastic.
Giuliana Furci
Thank you very much for having me here.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. We are really honored and delighted to have you. It’s amazing. So thank you. So I figured we should dive right in with a couple of questions. And the first thought I had are two things that I’ve heard you say, and one is that once you discover fungi in nature, your vision of nature will never be the same. And without fungi, the world as we know it would not exist. And these are like powerful, passionate, exciting statements that I would love you to share.
Giuliana Furci
Fungi play a role in nature that expands and goes beyond what you can see. Land plants can’t live outside, they can’t live on land without fungi that live on and in their roots and their cells. Plants can’t live outside of water without fungi in that symbiosis. And imagine without plants, we wouldn’t have the oxygen to live. There would be no animals. So literally, without fungi, the world as we know it would not exist. And so when you learn about them and how they live in different ecosystems and how they interact with plants and animals, us included, your perception of the world changes forever. Suddenly you appreciate what you can’t easily see, and you realize that there’s much more to what we’re seeing than we thought.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, I mean, it’s incredibly powerful. And it’s something that I think most people in general, until maybe more recently, have not appreciated or paid attention to. And something that struck me about it is, you know, we met at Harvard Divinity School and we’ve been talking and, you know, when you think of something like transcendence, you think of something like, that’s up or exalted, above you. And the more that I’ve learned about fungi and your work, I think about transcendence as something that’s underground and something like beautiful that comes from from beneath, that’s hidden, but that’s revealed. And I just. I’m saying that because it’s like, as I’ve read about your work, I just. The world starts opening up.
Giuliana Furci
It’s curious that you say that, because also when one thinks about humanity and looking to the divine, we as a species have always looked to the celestial from the terrestrial. And fungi have been the vehicle in that quest for the celestial. So, for example, from psychedelics to communion in the Roman Catholic Church today, you go and you get communion with wine and bread, and you can’t make wine or bread without yeast, and yeast are fungi. So always in these religious or just humans, humanity’s quest to look at the celestial, the vehicle, are always fungi.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s so exciting. It’s very cool. I’ve heard that mentioned too, about in church and the bread and that you have to have yeast and the, you know, was the Eucharist ever originally psychedelic? I know some people ask about that!
Giuliana Furci
And the wine.
Elizabeth Rovere
And the wine, yeah. So before we go any further, I think it might be helpful for our listeners to have you answer some really basic questions. If you don’t mind. What is a mushroom, what is a fungus, and what is a mycelium?
Giuliana Furci
A mushroom is a type of fungus. A fungus is an organism that is neither plant nor animal nor bacteria. It has a type of cell that is different. It’s a. It can be unicellular or multicellular. They don’t eat and digest, and they don’t photosynthesize. They live inside their food. They secrete enzymes, digest outside, and then absorb those nutrients back in. And mycelium is a microscopic, sometimes microscopic, structure that some fungi make to live in their food. So in the fungi, there are yeasts, molds, mushrooms, conchs. Lichen are studied inside the fungi, but lichen are a symbiotic organism between an algae and a fungus. But it’s the fungal reproductive structure that’s used to name the lichen. So they are housed inside the kingdom of the fungi. There are aquatic fungi in freshwater and marine ecosystems. Fungi live in the air. They live everywhere.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. That was the first time I learned that fungi live in, that there are aquatic fungi.
Giuliana Furci
Oh, yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
I had no idea.
Giuliana Furci
So fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants. And our common ancestor with animals are. As if I was a fungus. The fungi’s common ancestor with us animals is an organism called the opisthokonts, or opisthokonta, which is a unicellular organism with a posterior flagellum, just like the sperm, for example. And so still in some animals that type of cell and that body still exists. And in the fungi, too.
Elizabeth Rovere
I mean, I actually love that. I find that super exciting that we have this profound common ancestor from a long time ago. I think I told you that my daughter said that people look like mushrooms. Yes. So. So why should we be so surprised? But it’s pretty cool. So I’m curious about your calling and your experience of the forest and being kind of enamored with the first time that you saw fungi. And I know that you weren’t sure what you were doing, and you’re like, oh, my gosh. There was just a felt sense that this was something. There was a real calling for this.
Giuliana Furci
Yeah. I was studying aquaculture and studying red algae and saw just an advertisement on the halls of the university calling for students and volunteers to help sample fox scat. And I was like, that’s interesting. So I volunteered. I was the only person who volunteered to collect the fox cat and went with a professor to a forest in southern Chile. And that’s where I saw for the first time. It’s the first time I saw fungi, it’s not that I hadn’t seen them, but it’s that we saw each other. And there was a very beautiful orange mushroom on a tree stump, and I wanted to know who she was. And there were no books. And it was just this immediate sense of, I’m gonna do this. This is what I have to do. And that feeling has never stopped. And it only grows and grows and grows. And it’s just, you know, something came over me in that moment, I suppose, and it’s just been a responsibility that is not escapable.
Elizabeth Rovere
And so when you. You go out and do a lot of field work and I, you know, I’ve read a little bit about it. I’ve seen you on some of the YouTube videos and the National Geographic Explorer, and it’s just delightful to watch. And I’m wondering what it’s like for you, because it seems like you really, you lay down in the forest and you sense the fungi. And I’m just curious about that process because it feels like an embodied knowing, you know, something’s guiding you from inside.
Giuliana Furci
I think there are two ways to look at it, because one is experience. So I’ve been doing this for 25 years now. Over 25 years. And so I’ve spent a lot of time with them in their home, and I like spending time with them in their home. And so there’s something about a bodily feeling of temperature, of humidity, of just understanding when they are visible, more or less how many leaves are on the tree or what color the leaves are. So there’s something about experience with the fungi you know. And then there’s a sense. And that sense is a state of openness to an encounter that you can reach when you are calm and open. And that requires just a little moment to get into the forest and maybe a little prayer or permission, just nothing too ceremonious. Some people are more ceremonious. I’m just very quiet about it. And then that state of openness to encounter and to follow your intuition, your senses. Yeah. And more recently, there have been a few moments where I’ve dared say, oh, there’s someone there, and it might be in the dead of night, and I can stop the car and go, and they’ll be there. And that sense, before I wouldn’t say anything, now I’m daring with some people a bit more to mention.
Elizabeth Rovere
Well, I appreciate you saying that because I feel like the more that we learn about alternative ways of knowing and felt sense, and the more that we’re respecting the way that we can intuit and imagine and experience, the more that we can value these other ways, the world starts to open up.
Giuliana Furci
It’s also inevitable when you feel it, you can’t not.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s like, you know, it.
Giuliana Furci
I mean, it just is.
Elizabeth Rovere
And I mean, I think it’s funny because I, you know, as we were, we’ve been talking these last couple of days at this conference and you know, looking at this idea of like coming into discovery is with imagination and wonder and you don’t just then finish, you sort of still leave with imagination and wonder. And that that’s sort of a way of leading and integrating and sort of using a holistic perspective in your discovery. And it feels like that’s what you do, that you do, you do all of it. I mean it’s intellectual, it’s intuitive, it’s contemplative, it’s embodied, it’s auditory, visual.
Giuliana Furci
Yeah. And I’ve had the fortune of not having to follow a mould. Not a mold, mold, but a mould.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Giuliana Furci
I haven’t had to fit into a pre-established way of relating with fungi because there wasn’t where I was, there wasn’t a way. And so I, you know, just have my own way and have been able to have that way be a house for others.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, I’ve. And kind of, I think that’s exciting. We were talking about it before we started that you are self-taught and that you haven’t had to follow some kind of pre-established way and that, you know, as you were saying that to me, I feel so impressed and amazed by that because you’re teaching yourself and sometimes when you’re doing that, I mean you’re an explorer and you’re also following what you’re being called to do, your intuition.
Giuliana Furci
There’s something, I think, I think there’s a lot of credit I should and must give to my mother who was very clear at teaching me that something didn’t have to be done for me to do it. I mean if it wasn’t done, you can also do it. And that sense of empowerment, of you can create something new. If it’s not done, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it. And so to follow that and to really but follow through with it. And then with time, you know, after 16 years of being self-taught, I had the opportunity to learn with the best teacher in the world, Don Pfister, here at Harvard at The Farlow. And there, there was a lot of learning, but there was also a validation that what I had self-learned was actually okay. And that was great.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s like a lesson like, Harvard found you. You didn’t have to find Harvard.
Giuliana Furci
Well, yeah, it was, it was, yeah, it was like that, to be honest. Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
Can you tell? I mean, it’s a beautiful story because Don is in the Department of Biology, a mycologist.
Giuliana Furci
He’s been the head of the Farlow, which is the house of mycology here in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard for 50 years. The Farlow has been around for 100 years. And I was in Colombia, in the country Colombia, at a pre-congress course. I would just lap up any opportunity to learn anything. Being self-taught, you just, you’ll read everything that you find. And there was this congress and there’s this course on the microscopy of mushrooms right before. And I’d never done any of that before. So I was like, I’m taking this course. And I was there with some teachers, and this gentleman came up to me and said, “Are you Giuliana?” “Yeah.” “You’re from the Fungi foundation in Chile?” “Yeah.” He’s like, “Well, I’ve seen the pictures online, I’ve seen the website. I’ve seen that you’re self-taught and I really want to help you and support you and want to invite you to come to my lab to study.” And I was like, “Oh, thanks a lot, you know. Yeah, but you know, I don’t know much about mycology. I’m self-taught. Thanks, but no thanks.” And he left. And the teachers there that were teaching me the microscopy of mushrooms said, “Do you realize what just happened?” I was like, “No”. “Do you know who he is?” I’m like, “No”. And they’re like, “Well, it’s Don Pfister from Harvard inviting you to do a study stay.” And I was like, “I’m not doing that. There’s no way I can do that.” And so he approached me again in the hotel lobby that afternoon or that evening, and he said, “I really want to teach you and help you.” And at that point I knew who he was. I was like, “Thank you, but no. I mean, I’ve never had a mycology course. I don’t even know the biology of the fungal cell. Like, it’s like hitting your head against a concrete wall with me.” And he said, “Well, I’ve been teaching for close to 40 years, and I’m sure I can teach you and please come.” And then a couple of weeks later I got a formal letter of invitation from Don and Harvard to come and I came with my son and I spent some months here and he sat with me and taught me the microscopy of Ascomycetes and just basically showed me that I knew more than I thought, in a way.
Elizabeth Rovere
And I’m sure that he learned so much from you as well.
Giuliana Furci
About Chilean fungi, yes. And we’ve been in the field many a time and as he said today, when he introduced me, it was lovely, he’s like she knows her mushrooms. And 20 something years later now I more or less know who lives in Chile.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. No, it’s really such a beautiful story and I love that he found you and you had already started the Fungi Foundation at that time. So, you know, it’s just. So he knew of you and the work that you were doing and really, really respected it. It’s just, it’s lovely.
Giuliana Furci
I mean, I’ve got the best of jobs in that sense because I get to go to the field a lot and I get to go to the field for different reasons and I devise reasons to go as well.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Giuliana Furci
And I have a bit more freedom in the sense that sometimes we’re going for teaching reasons, sometimes we’re going to make a film, sometimes we’re going to collect, sometimes we’re going to, you know, collect for others. And there are just many reasons, many more reasons to go than maybe strictly in academia. So there’s a big difference. In being self-taught, I am a generalist, so I know different types of fungi. Many academics focus on one type of fungus. So I have been able to help research groups in which Don has been and others because I’ve gotten to know coralloid fungi, cup shaped fungi, mushroom shaped fungi, gelatinous. As a generalist, because I would just take in everything I could find. I wasn’t studying just the jelly fungi. So I offer an array of possibilities of some names or who they might be or where they might be in Chile. Many. Almost all the ones you can see instead of just one type. This empirical experience of being with them in their home.
Elizabeth Rovere
Exactly.
Giuliana Furci
With all of them.
Elizabeth Rovere
Being with all of them in their home.
Giuliana Furci
All the same, not one more than another.
Elizabeth Rovere
Exactly. That’s what I feel like. I hope I’m not coming too hard down on academia. It’s just that when you just go in to look for a jelly mushroom, you don’t see the rest of them, you’re not seeing how they interact. And it seems like that’s that whole kind of aspect of missing the whole, only seeing the part. And that is not just a metaphor for mushrooms, but for everything. We are missing the whole.
Giuliana Furci
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
And that’s why I’m thinking and I feel like watching your interaction with Don, he sees that, he gets that. And I’m hoping that that could be a way to sort of bring that more to the science world. And even hearing Merlin Sheldrake talk about that, like, why do I have to choose between science and humanities? Why are we not looking at all of it? You’re bringing in not just the humanities, but the art, music and the whole family. And I just have the deepest respect and appreciation for it.
Giuliana Furci
I mean, I’ve been at this for a very long time and it’s always been incorporated, especially the work with the arts. Since 2012, we were already working with artists, the Fungi Foundation, with artists in different biennales around the world, with video art pieces, with dance, with painting, with poetry and installations and pop up museums. It’s always been central as a way for people to feel fungal love as well. It’s not about facts, it’s about feeling it. And once you’ve felt it, your world will never be the same again. But I do want to say that there’s something that sounds extremely romantic about being self-taught, but there’s something very harsh about it too. And I’m not self-taught because I wanted to, it’s because I had no alternative. And if I wanted to know more about fungi, the only choice was to go about it by myself or leave Chile and go somewhere else. And it has a lot of difficulties. And that’s why Don was so meaningful and has been so meaningful. And Paul Stamets, originally in 2004 or 5, he was the first person who I met and I was like, I mean, there’s another one! I was like, there’s somebody else out there who feels the same. Feels, not knows, feels this for them. But yeah. So I mean, I encourage learning by yourself and learning so much more and going beyond. But I do also acknowledge the importance of learning from others who have had a journey.
Elizabeth Rovere
Well, the mentorship in that way.
Giuliana Furci
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
And it makes me think of, well, there’s two things. The one is about just going back to the relationship aspect and feeling and then also looking at, you know, you talked about romantic, and you’re saying romantic idea, but also thinking of the romantic movement and like how there was a period of time that, you know, scientists were looking at the whole. That kind of got dismissed. Who talked about nature as interactive and reciprocal, which, you know, I think is your experience too.
Giuliana Furci
Totally animistic is the notion that there’s anima in every living being and it’s the certainty and the relationship with every living being in a soulful way. It’s a way of living.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, that’s what you mean when you see nature in a different way, completely, that’s changed. Yeah, I mean, it rubs off. Because I feel like reading your work, watching these films, you see it. You see it. Listening to Song of the Cedars. Maybe we should talk about that because that’s a beautiful relationship. I had never heard of that before. And when I first listened to it and I wasn’t paying attention to the lyrics, I was just listening to the sounds and I could feel this resonance in my whole body. I was like, what is this? And then I looked at the lyrics and I was like, oh my God. You know, it’s about life, it’s about death, it’s about interconnection, and it’s not even that long.
Giuliana Furci
I mean, when you get Cosmo Sheldrake together with Robert Macfarlane, you won’t get less. You know, it’s just Rob is an incredible lyricist. And we were at a high camp in a cloud forest in Ecuador that’s recognized as a subject of rights and the rights of nature in the articles of the Ecuadorian Constitution. It’s called Los Cedros, the cedar, Los Cedros. And we were looking for the headwaters of the river Los Cedros for a book that Rob has just published called “Is a River Alive?” And we were just sitting there around a campfire and Rob started writing some lyrics. I pitched in with some lyrics and Cosmo immediately just pulled out his phone and just basically started loading the sounds that he had recorded that day or the day before. And we literally there, I mean, there’s video of the song in its exact shape made there in the forest, with the forest. And so because the forest is a subject of rights, we felt that we needed to ensure that the cloud forest was co-author of the song as well. The song was made in the forest with the forest. Four humans and a forest. So we filed a legal petition to request the moral co-authorship of the song to the forest. And it’s still in the copyright process in the offices in Ecuador. It’s been rejected and we’ve appealed. And if it’s rejected again, then we’re going to take it to the courts.
Elizabeth Rovere
Fantastic.
Giuliana Furci
Yeah. And it’s a forest that has rights. So how do the rights extend, for example, to this case of co-authorship of a song?
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, I mean, it’s actually very meaningful. And it sets a precedent. Yeah, in a way. In a way that puts us in this place as humans, that we are in relationship. We are in an interconnected relationship.
Giuliana Furci
We’re part. Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
We’re a part. Yeah, exactly.
Giuliana Furci
Yeah. We’re not separate.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. So. And you talk about when you’re in the forest, like, when you’re not with the fungi, do you miss them? Like, do you feel it or do you always feel them?
Giuliana Furci
Well, they’re everywhere.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Giuliana Furci
It’s what I do all day is I’m thinking, I am at service of the fungi. I work for the fungi, for their habitats and for the people who depend on them. And I’ve been doing it for 25 years. It’s everything.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s everything.
Giuliana Furci
It’s just my existence is not separate from theirs and I’m at service and the question is, what can I do for you? It’s vocation. You’re not separate.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. As I’ve read about your work and about fungi and about this idea or really manifestation of decomposition and transcendence or transformation underground and the way that it’s connected with wonder and the way in which that grief can be connected with wonder. Because there’s something about loss and discovery and going into the dark or the unknown. And I wanted to ask you if there’s a way in which your work with fungi has informed or shifted your relationship with death and loss.
Giuliana Furci
The answer’s been shifting. I made a short film called Let Things Rot. It’s a day and a half shooting with a filmmaker who had lost one of his best mates on K2 going up the mountain. And he came with his camera and we made Let Things Rot, which looks at the importance of decomposition, how the end of one life form is actually the beginning of many other life forms and the importance of letting things rot. Ideas, ideals, bodies, things have to decompose. But then shortly after that, my father died. And in. In Brazil, in, you know, complicated circumstances, administratively, to get his body back, I was fighting rot. I had to, like, ensure for a month that he didn’t decompose. And that moment of the loss of my father and where I was after trying to not have him rot is when I went to Ecuador and part of that’s in the chapter in “Is a River Alive?” with Rob Macfarlane and Cosmo and César when we went up. Up the mountain. So I think decomposition is desirable and it has to happen. But how that happens and that relationship with loss and grief and decomposition is not a direct one. I learned that, you know, the harder way after really, like, advocating to let things rot, I was then for a whole month trying for my dad not to rot. So, I mean, I don’t know how to answer the question. In regards to grief and loss. Yeah, it’s a hard one.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s a hard one. It’s a really hard one. So then you said you went and did the cloud forest right after that.
Giuliana Furci
It was the only trip I left standing for many months after that. Yeah. And everybody should read the book “Is a River Alive?” First of all, because it’s a fascinating book about rivers and rights of nature and rights of rivers. But also there are stories in there of incredible people in Canada and India and then the story of our trip there to Los Cedaros and the incredible cloud forest and the river and the whole case of that rights of nature in Ecuador. But there’s a bit of a description there about that.
Elizabeth Rovere
I mean, it must have been helpful as well, to be there during that time. I was imagining.
Giuliana Furci
Yeah, well, it was helpful and hard and then wonderful and, yeah, reviving.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, reviving.
Giuliana Furci
I went up the mountain crying and came down smiling. So it was good.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s beautiful. Yeah.
Giuliana Furci
So The Song of the Cedars is also very special for me in that sense.
Elizabeth Rovere
And just as part of the Fungi Foundation that you started, I know that you’re also doing this oral history campaign. You spoke a little bit about that at the Harvard conference, and it was deeply resonant. It seemed like it felt very resonant to the audience.
Giuliana Furci
Everyone was happy!
Elizabeth Rovere
People were inspired by it.
Giuliana Furci
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
I was wondering if you’d speak a little bit about that because it’s pretty powerful, and you asked a question that I think will remain a question for a while. But collecting this information, this knowledge, this wisdom is really meaningful.
Giuliana Furci
I think it’s shifted from collecting it, the idea of collecting it now, to documenting it and leaving it with those who have relationships. So basically, I mean, over the course of the Fungi Foundation’s life, we’ve worked heavily on conservation, and there’s a whole global scaffolding for conservation that we’ve built with countries, with nations, and it’s been implemented in other countries. And now there are other organizations that like that and are doing something similar. And so I sort of feel that that’s something that will be at some point more or less done. In education, we’ve built a free mycological curriculum from kindergarten to 12th grade in different languages. It’s free. The webinars are up and there are enrollments from over 80 countries. Thousands of kids, different languages, and now fungi in national curricula. So there’s something there. Expeditions. If you don’t do it, it’s very hard to survive. And so you have to go to the forest. I want to be with them. But then there’s this realization that they’re in these human relationships and how humans have culturally co-evolved with fungi. Most places around the world, nobody’s asked indigenous peoples, local communities, traditional societies, you know, how they live with fungi. And it just feels that that’s something that I have to do for at least the next decade probably. I speak several languages, I travel with ease. I think I’ve found a way to relate to people that it’s not extracting and just inviting them or being invited to document that relationship just feels like what I have to do now. There’s no way to document those relationships other than recording, mostly audio recording and leaving that with those people and those communities in the act and just zero. We don’t expect to do anything with it. We’re not collecting it, we’re not publishing it. We don’t need to do anything other than give the possibility for elders to leave to younger people in those communities that relation documented. We are not willing to let it be lost.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, because as you were saying, a lot of the grandchildren have left.
Giuliana Furci
These are grandparents who learned from their grandparents and whose grandchildren have left to the city. But it has challenges. It has many challenges. One of the challenges is that as a foundation, we don’t have an agenda with those relationships. We’re not going to publish it. We don’t have a product associated to it. And therefore, when you’re requesting for grants or support, there’s nothing you can give. We’re gonna go to these remote places, you know, we’re gonna canoe up the river for two days. We’re gonna sit there, you know, we need a translator, we need somebody to record, we need anthropologists. This whole like expensive thing. And then what will you have? Well, nothing. We’re gonna leave them a thumb drive and leave them a hard drive and leave them the recording. And it’s just very hard to be able to do that.
Elizabeth Rovere
But you’re deeply valuing it. Like you’re deeply valuing the relationship, the history of this ancestral knowledge that we don’t, you know, want to lose. And when you go and you speak to these people in Mexico, for example, or India, I mean, there’s something that’s very sacred, it’s very beautiful, about that kind of connection. And as you said, people respond to you, and they say, no one has ever asked us about our relationship with fungi. And then they have so much to share with you!
Giuliana Furci
They have so many different stories.
Elizabeth Rovere
No one’s asked the question.
Giuliana Furci
Nobody’s asked the question. For example, one that one can share is this relationship between lightning and mushrooms. And it’s widespread all over the world.
Elizabeth Rovere
I love that story.
Giuliana Furci
You can find it in different places, and there are several others like that. So, for instance, you would say, you know, are there any deities or forces of nature that are, you know, that your culture, your people relate to mushrooms? And most will say, well, lightning and thunder and, you know, when I was a kid, we would have to go where lightning struck to go and find the mushrooms. You find it everywhere, but you need to open a space for that to come out. And so I feel that the long relationship I have with them, with fungi, gives me an opportunity to be able to sort of invite certain possibilities of relationships to come into the conversation.
Elizabeth Rovere
Absolutely, because you recognize it and you have some of those types of relationships yourself.
Giuliana Furci
Yes, and experience.
Elizabeth Rovere
But some people want to share the information and some people definitely don’t. And you’re respectful, obviously, of both. But when you record this, you give them the thumb drive and then they just have it and will pass it on to their, I guess, kids if they want?
Giuliana Furci
Or to the school or sometimes there’s a local governance system, but it’s very fragile. So one thing is giving them this, here’s the thumb drive. And at the same time, we hold a copy. And that copy has been in the agreements of data sovereignty and all these agreements of documenting this. We’ve been recording mostly with Cosmo Sheldrake doing the recordings. He’s also an anthropologist and a musician and field recorder, and he holds a backup, physical backup. It’s not up on a cloud or anything like that. There’s a physical backup in case they need another thumb drive of that same recording, right. But that’s where we’ve landed. I mean, we haven’t resolved it further than that. The Fungi Foundation team doesn’t have the recording.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right. And that’s the question right now.
Giuliana Furci
That’s what feels now that has to be done. I mean, there’s no alternative, there’s no time. There’s not another generation to figure this out. And the repositories are mostly held in systems that don’t respect the data sovereignty and many of the repositories do have a system in which it will be shared independent of the will of whoever.
Elizabeth Rovere
There’s a deep integrity in what you’re discussing that feels really important. I mean, I know you’ve told us about the lightning strikes and the mushrooms and the deities. Is there something that you can share that you’ve learned, not necessarily about that specific people or that specific mushroom, but something that surprised you or that opened your mind in a way?
Giuliana Furci
Oh, I mean, there have been a couple that. You know, one that has been really incredible is among women in different parts of the world, there are certain fungi that are used for birth control. And it’s sort of like a, you know, a secret, you know, between the women. It’s like we just drink this tea and we have less babies. You know, it’s been interesting to see that. And then there are other really astonishing things that happen where there might be communities, adjacent communities, that live not very far apart, that have a relationship with the same fungus in a medicinal way. Maybe one will use it for the eyes and the other one will use it for the ears. And they live 10km apart. But they never knew that they were using them for the ears and they didn’t know that, oh, they’re using them for the eyes, for example. And you’ll see, it’s interesting to see because nobody’s ever asked, nobody’s triggered the conversations among them, let alone ask them, but not even trigger those conversations among them. So it’s an important role to go and trigger and sort of. It’s like a reignition of the fungal value, fungal love, fungal appreciation. But my experience has been that we reignite something that is there and that just unravels. Yeah. And all sorts of things. And then one of the relationships that’s blown my mind the most is the relationship that the Yanomami people have. The Yanomami people live in Brazil, Venezuela, across the border, and they weave baskets with mycelial strands of the leaf catcher fungi, so the marasmius. And then, you know, they’re these really thick, black, shiny mycelial cords, threads, and they use them to weave baskets. And they’re just beautiful. Yeah. And if you go to Manaus in Brazil, you can buy Yanomami baskets and sometimes, you know, I have quite a few of them that I’ve been gifted or some that I’ve purchased, and sometimes you see a little mushroom coming out of them. You know, you still got the little tiny mushrooms because they’re very small mushrooms. That’s a really beautiful, you know, relationship. For example, that shows the extent. It’s not only medicine, it’s not only eating, dying. There’s also weaving.
Elizabeth Rovere
Well, and also you’d mentioned today, fire starting.
Giuliana Furci
Oh, fire starting is a big one.
Elizabeth Rovere
For 5,000 years.
Giuliana Furci
Yeah, and even if you, I mean, there’s like a Bear Grylls episode where he’s in the forest and he has to light a fire and he’s using the tinder fungus. I mean, it’s widespread and every good field emergency kit has a bit of fungal tinder in it. We carry that stuff.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s amazing. And then also the puffball fungus. You were saying that shepherds carry it around in case…
Giuliana Furci
Yeah, to heal wounds. Yeah. Some use it on people, some on animals, some on both.
Elizabeth Rovere
Have you ever had to use it?
Giuliana Furci
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’ve tried it, of course. Oh, gotta try this. Yeah. There’s always an opportunity to get a wound in the forest.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes. As I’ve heard.
Giuliana Furci
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
I know that your foundation has done some work with preserving the archives of Maria Sabina and that history and that story. I’m just curious about that because it seems tragic what happened and also just fascinating the entire story of her as a curandera and the sacred history of the ceremony.
Giuliana Furci
So the Fungi Foundation supports the García Flores family and García Dorantes family that has an archive among which there are videos and photos of Maria Sabina. It’s not all about Maria Sabina. So Renato García Dorantes was one of the Huautla photographers, town photographers and videographer. And for 40 years he was documenting, you know, all sorts of town life and cultural life in the Mazatec Sierra. And among which, for example, you know, he. He has footage of Maria Sabina’s wedding, of her visiting her family in the cemetery or her funeral. But also several other curanderos and curanderas, not all working with fungi, some working with plants and other ceremonies. So it’s a vast archive, and that archive was being lost, and it was being lost to pests, to molds and other. And Inti, the archivist son, reached out and is like, you know, we have this problem. Can you help us? So I took on the quest of helping to save the archive, to clean the archive, to build a storage room. And now we finally have a museum we’re opening in October. But this is not about Maria Sabina. It’s about the history and the memory of Mazatec culture. And of course, she’s very much part of that, but so many others.
Elizabeth Rovere
But part of that culture is about the sacred, the ceremony?
Giuliana Furci
Oh very important, the veladas and the relationship with psilocybe there is very old, and it’s very deep and it’s very alive, and it’s been very damaged. It has a lot of, you know, there are a lot of words we can use. But what I’ve learned with Inti there is that the ceremony and the ingestion of psilocybin, these sacred mushrooms. The reason that you would eat them isn’t to find God, right? Or to illuminate. There are more or less three reasons for which you would do a ceremony. They’re called veladas. So candlelit because they’re during the night. And you would eat the mushrooms if you’re ill, if you have a feud in the community, like a fight with a family member, with somebody, with a friend, or if you’ve lost something. So you’re eaten to find something..
Elizabeth Rovere
Like an object or a person?
Giuliana Furci
An object or a person. To find something you’ve lost. Could be an object. And so it’s very different than what’s been portrayed, I think, or reimagined.
Elizabeth Rovere
Is there a way that fungi are communicating to us somehow, biochemically, whether or not I’m ingesting it or listening, that somehow it’s being communicated more profoundly, say, for example, than, I don’t know, something else?
Giuliana Furci
I’m not sure. I don’t know. And also, there are so many ways to be a fungus. A fungus isn’t one thing.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Giuliana Furci
And that’s really important. And so, you know, are animals communicating?
Elizabeth Rovere
I think so.
Giuliana Furci
Right. Are plants?
Elizabeth Rovere
I think so.
Giuliana Furci
Then you’d probably think mushrooms too.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. I probably do.
Giuliana Furci
I mean, there are smells. Definitely smells. Some make some sounds. Like there are these fungi and they’re tiny. They shoot this ball out and you can hear like “pop, pop, pop” when you’re walking in the forest. They’re tiny.
Elizabeth Rovere
Wait, do they do it? I mean, are they trying to get your attention?
Giuliana Furci
No, they’re trying to stick spores onto you. A sort of motion triggered spore discharger, the sphaerobolus. But it’s mechanical, right? It’s the mechanics that makes the sound. It’s not a sound. It’s a mechanism that produces that sound. But I don’t know if they are, you know, I would never dare try to speak for a fungus. I have no idea if they’re trying to communicate with us or not.
Elizabeth Rovere
Okay, so I want to ask one question before we have to stop. So, I loved your National Geographic Explorer video. It’s really delightful and beautiful and fun and I can’t believe you had a hurt knee during that. It still blows my mind. But for people in the US we love Nat Geo, we just think it’s great and you know, we follow people like Jane Goodall. And for you to like have that honor, you know, it’s like, oh my God, that’s like the greatest honor. And then knowing that you also met Jane Goodall, I was just curious about that for you, that experience, because I know you connected with her and she gave you sort of an impetus to do what you’re doing to a certain extent. And that also being a mom and being out in the field and that.
Giuliana Furci
And we’ve also reconnected again. We were just together for half a day in August and just did a tour of a mushroom exhibit. I mean, she’s just fantastic. I mean, she’s incredible. And she’s really supportive of the fungal cause and acknowledges, I think, at least my effort and because she relates as well to an effort of doing something like that. Yeah, but with National Geographic, it’s pretty bizarre because when I got the award from National Geographic, first of all, I was in a remote fjord in Patagonia and suddenly this like satellite call comes in saying there’s this message that if we don’t answer now, like there’s this award, but you have to accept it. And otherwise no. And I was like, this must be a joke. You know, literally sort of standing on a tip of a mountain to get the signal. And so that was pretty bizarre. And then receiving that award, for me, it was an opportunity. It wasn’t a recognition. So immediately I knew that fungi weren’t included in their definition of wildlife. I knew that they had never had a cover story about fungi in the magazine. I knew all these things when I accepted that award. And the award was an opportunity to change things. And that’s what happened. I got the award and, you know, a year later, they were included in the definition of wildlife. There’s funding that can be allocated to mycological grants. And then shortly, about a year and a half after, the magazine came out and the film came out. So I didn’t take it as something for me. I took it as an opportunity for the fungi, to do something for the fungi. And it worked out like that. I don’t know if that. I always joke with everybody at Nat Geo saying, you didn’t know what you were getting into when you gave me that award.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, I bet they love it, though. I bet they do. Don’t you think they welcome it?
Giuliana Furci
Yeah, I’m sure now. I’m sure they do, but it was pretty.
Elizabeth Rovere
It helps them be more cutting edge. Now they’re talking about flora, fauna and funga.
Giuliana Furci
Yeah, definitely. But it was an opportunity that was presented to them by an opportunity that they presented to me.
Elizabeth Rovere
Hey, I love it. It’s great.
Giuliana Furci
The reward is as much for the person who receives it as for those who give it.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s true. That’s very true. Yeah. Thank you. What can we say after that? Thank you, Giuliana, for joining us and thank you for listening. I loved this conversation. I still cannot get over the fact that we have a common cousin with the mushroom and that humans are more closely related to mushrooms than plants are. How do you guys feel about that? Tell us in the comments. And don’t forget to sign up for our new newsletter. I’m really excited to share more reflections and behind the scenes updates with you there. Wonderstruck is produced by Nastasya Gecim and edited by Niall Kenny at Striking Wonder Productions. Special thanks to Brian O’Kelly, Eliana Eleftheriou, Travis Reece, Josh Wilcox, Camilla Newman and Liz Baillie. And remember, keep wondering as your compass, and may you experience awe on your path.
