The tree lungwort is an incredible, and increasingly rare, epiphytic lichen that is distributed across the globe in the wet, humid forests, particularly fond of coastal areas. As a lichen, it is an example of the sort of strange cooperation between numerous species for their mutual aid that is symbiotic and not parasitic. There are three different species that make up the tree lungwort, including a fungus, an algae, and a cyanobacteria, each performing their own function for the greater good of the whole organism.
The common name “lungwort” has been used to describe many species of plants, but this lichen, Lobaria pulmonaria, is not related to any of the others, although as the name implies all of the various lungworts have been historically used for treatment of respiratory ailments. Tree lungwort is under threat due to numerous factors, virtually all of them due to humans in one way or another.
This is the perfect time to acquaint ourselves with the spirit of Lobaria pulmonaria, because it offers a perspective that is refreshingly different – an antidote for this era or perhaps simply a balm to soothe.
Schaude, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Many years ago there was a discussion across social media and blogs about rewilding the Craft, where some, myself among them, felt that modern Witchcraft had sacrificed too much of what made it dangerous in the name of acceptance from other religions and society at large. There was a sense that perhaps Witchcraft was no longer red of tooth and nail.
Witchcraft, to some degree, should feel threatening. It should feel threatening because of its difference, its power and its oddity. It can represent something that feels foreign, “other,” to people who aren’t part of its practices. In some forms it can be a challenge to the status quo.
Witchcraft is queer. Witchcraft is radical. Witchcraft is part of nature, is the voice of the natural world, speaking through human mouths. Or at least, it can be.
Witchcraft is strange because humans are alienated from their environments. Humans for the most part have lost a connection with the rhythms of nature, with the intimacy of birth and death, with the interdependency with the land and its inhabitants, both in flesh and also in spirit.
When people pull stunts like the recent, viral deer-eating “witches”, all I see are people trying to create a sensation by playing into tropes about what Witches are. It’s cosplay and Witch-porn, performative because it’s done with the viewer in mind.
Honestly, I sometimes enjoy things like this myself. Just for a moment we want to put a thumb in the eye of the overculture. But by embracing the spectacle, we step away from meaning towards the representation of meaning. This is a strangeness that is titillating, but it can become damaging, and can cause harm to real people.
To live in the margins, to be strange to a society that sees cooperation, mutual aid, and investment in the lives of others — not for gain, but because it is the right way to be — changes a person. If you’re born with seeming difference, or what you are told is difference, you live as “the other.” Even the concept of communication and language can be challenged when what you are, or are becoming, is deemed foreign. This pushes us to try to cultivate new language in order to better communicate with others like us.
This is something that I frequently bring up when I discuss animism. As one of the likely earliest impulses of humanity to interact spiritually with the other beings of this world, animism is something that lives within all of us to this day. Think of our tendency to search for patterns, especially as it manifests as pareidolia, the tendency to see faces in random patterns of cloud, in tree bark, on mountains, and so on.
Animism is a stark departure from the way that humans process and consume the world now. It seeks partnerships rather than control, and for those new to it, can create challenges that our brains simply have a hard time adjusting to at first. But it’s also a return to something that many, at least in the West, had abandoned generations or millennia ago. It’s a reclaiming of our innate humanity.
Photo by Ryan Holloway from Pexels
The humble and endangered tree lungwort can be a great partner for us as we do so. As a living being, it exists as a collective – is in fact made up of many beings. In much the same way, our own bodies are less “us” than a community of organisms that we identify as a being with a name and generally agreed upon identity. The tree lungwort attaches itself to trees but doesn’t harm them, collecting water and dim sunlight to create its own food. In the age of modern medicine, one of the primary ways that humans used to use it has mostly fallen by the wayside. It is a rare, strange and beautiful being who can be an example of how we persist and begin to thrive, open ourselves to interdependence, seek to bring less harm into the world and occupy space fearlessly.
While I don’t live near any examples of the species, and with its endangered status, few who read this will probably have seen them in the wild, we still have the ability to connect with its spirit, to honor it and develop a relationship to nourish ourselves and keep us strong in the face of adversity.
A sort of Puritanical conservatism has manifested in the United States, something that seeks to other, to outlaw and demonize. That sentiment has existed in the shadows or in the open air at varying times in this country’s history. Our continued existence is dependent on our ability to comfortably occupy what we are told is strange, to cultivate and expand it. By doing so, we are able to change the narrative about what it means to be strange and empower our craft, our magick and our identities.
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