Listen to the curated audio version of this podcast, which weaves the main conversations and reflection prompts together on Spotify here, or Apple Podcasts here, or Acast here.

"We are a family of cells making sense of laughter, a watery collection of tireless vitality. We are a long-tongued bee lost in legume and clover and a blanketing dayscape of small biotic collisions. We are a newt-filled dawn and a mud flat packed with clams. We are a split gill with twenty thousand sexes; a termite queen basking in adulation. Knowing this will always protect you.” - Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, "Continuation"

Welcome to the third episode of REBIRTH, a limited podcast series produced by advaya, a platform for transformative education. I am your host, Tammy Gan, and this four-part series is produced in partnership with Stella McCartney Beauty, a conscious alternative to luxury skincare.

This episode features Dr. Patricia Kaishian: a mycologist and Visiting Professor of Biology at Bard College in NY, as well as faculty with the Bard Prison Initiative. Patty writes: "It is past time that humans turn to the fungi to which we are bound, step into our mutual totality, and create space and futures for our wild ways of being." In this conversation, we dive into mycology as a queer discipline: what do our fungi friends teach us about entanglement and interdependence in a more-than-human world? How can we, like fungi, reclaim land, bodies, and nutrients, and rebirth into the world through decomposition?