Pandora's Amphora #2

 WE LOVE MUSHROOMS!

SHROOMFEST42... A marvelous year. Everything came together ... The afternoon monsoons started in early July amidst a record drought and haven’t stopped yet. Warm days heated the soil at altitude ... Britt Bunyard gathered a wonderful group of presenters. Festival staffers (calling themselves Team Cooperation) Ashley Smith, Matt Guertin and Teal Stetson-Lee got operations under firm control for the smoothest production in years. The Telluride Institute’s Team Mushroom provided decision-making oversight. Over 500 people bought passes ... 

Sunny days alternating with late day rains made perfect foray weather. The lectures were extraordinary, particularly those of Mark Plotkin, Giuliana Furci, Tradd Cotter and Irene Dubin, as well as John Michelotti, Peter Hendricks, Lauren Czaplicki, and Bryn Dentinger, Louie Schwartzberg’s new film “Gratitude Revealed” had many of us crying in our seats, awed by the beauty. The MycoLicious MycoLuscious MycoLogical Poetry Show had itkis audience riveted to the performances. John Sir Jesse and Katrina Blair had very successful dinner specials. The vendors brought a whole new level of myco-surprises and delights. My favorite was PACT -- a toolkit for pooping in the woods: visit there website HERE...

Riitta Ikonen offered a delightful costume playground (aka “workshop”) pre-parade. The parade was spectacular and the djembe drum & dance circle in the Town Park was ecstatic thanks to West African master Etienne Tolno with Skyler Hollinbeck and his crew of locals ... And that’s just some highlights. The entire week was magical with many other wonderful people, events and interactions. Kudos to all.

PAUL STAMETS ... Our great Fungophile sent a wonderful video to this year's event from his home in British Columbia and honored me with this short segment.

TONY CORBIN ... is the son of the legendary John Corbin, entheogenic grower extraordinaire, who was a core of the festival in itkis early years. Here’s what he had to say about this year: 

“I can't express to you all how much it means to me that you keep the TMF alive (and thriving!) As Rick Hollinbeck said (and to paraphrase/mirror his words), to many of us, it is as much a giant family reunion as it is a festival. I am closer to so many people I see in Telluride once a year than I am to many people I see almost daily. There is some bitter sweet for the people who are no longer with us but their legacy that you all keep alive brings me literally to tears of emotion when I think about it (yes, my vision is blurry and my cheeks are wet as I write these comments). So from me, and so many others, to every one of you and your volunteers and everyone at the Telluride Institute, THANK YOU! from the bottom of my heart and soul.”

Photo by Heather Stella

SALZMAN AWARD ... The Salzman Award is given to those who’ve done so much to keep the Shroomfest alive for going on four decades now. This year we awarded the Hollinbeck family – Rick, Marty, Mesa, Amy, Sky – for all their work behind the scenes...

The kids have grown up with the festival and Rick & Marty have been with us since day one. Congratulations to my Norwood homies.

LINCOFF AWARD ... The Lincoff Award goes to someone who has contributed greatly to the world of mycology, and Laura Guzmán-Dávalos of Mexico certainly fits the bill. Her work and her graceful presence was a huge boost to the festival this year and the world of mycology internationally. 

FASCINATING FACTOID ... According to the brilliant Dr. Bryn Dentiger of the University of Utah, what we have started calling Boletus rubiceps may be an incorrect name, and what we actually have is a variety of B. edulis after all. Taxonomy is perhaps the most confusing of all disciplines in the mycological world ... However, Bryn is no dogmatist and suggests we call mushrooms whatever we like, depending on the context we’re in. So, in the field, if not in the lab, I’m calling one of my favorite mushrooms the redhead, taxonomists notwithstanding.

77 ... Itki was my birthday during the fest (a lovely blessing) and I turned 77. That’s a very interesting number, besides being on the very cusp of old age (the body knows that, though the mind often forgets). 77 turns out to be the sum of the first eight prime numbers, the atomic number of Iridium, and the boiling point of nitrogen (in kelvins). During World War II in Sweden at the border with Norway, "77" was used as a shibboleth (password), because the tricky pronunciation in Swedish made it easy to instantly discern whether the speaker was native Swedish, Norwegian, or German.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON ... I subscribe to this excellent historian’s daily reports on what’s happening politically in this country. Here’s a sample from a recent post: “Denying enslaved Black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation. The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled propaganda and religion to defend their dominance. Lincoln argued that workers were not simply drudges but rather were the heart of the economy. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” He tied the political vision of the Framers to this economic vision. In order to prosper, he argued, men needed 'book-learning,' and he called for universal education. An educated community, he said, will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.”

INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE ... Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) – easily the most important historical treatise I’ve read since Dolores LaChapelle’s Sacred Land Sacred Sex Rapture of the Deep (Finn Hill Arts, out of print) – documents the fascinating argument that itki was the Indigenous North American critique of Western Civilization, as was encountered after Columbus, that led directly to the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions. A must read ... If you don’t know the Wendat Philosopher-Statesman Kandiaronk as described by Louis Armand, Baron de Lahonton, in the early 1700s in New Voyages to North America, read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass to learn what Indigenous Wisdom means.

THE TALKING GOURD

[Ed. Note: Going back to the tradition of having a poem at the end of my column as I’ve done for decades. This one is about Hesiod’s story of Pandora by my dear friend, Arvada poet Cottonwood Kate]

Last One Out 

She was the last one out of the box 

(well, the jar, really; bad translations

aside boxes were not always square 

in ancient Greece. This one had a lid 

which Pandora screwed open). She 

lingered there beneath the lip, did Hope 

(real name: Elpis). 

Some say she stayed inside. Maybe that’s why 

we’re slow to take her in. She’s hard to see. 

Some don’t believe in her at all—brag that they 

never have. Though, examined more closely, 

their own lives might reveal her quiet presence 

in a dusty nook or unopened cupboard. She doesn’t 

boast, show pride of place or being. Her way is more 

like that of feather’s drift, or the river beginning in 

a snowstorm, or a four-hundred-year-old oak riding 

home as an acorn in the pocket of a child. Not that she 

is childlike necessarily. Older hearts, softened by all 

else unloosed by Pandora (yet another woman made 

from spare parts—a rib, flowers, clay, whatever’s close 

at hand) have learned to shelter her. Even those hardened against her can ignite by a spark, sometimes struck in a flame held close by another. I’ve seen her face, settled with 

the same look in the eyes of a newborn as in one leaving the world. She can delight with the deft touch of a dragonfly or sting us into her self-same praise. 

Forgotten? For her sake and ours, I hope not.

-Kathleen Cain