66. The Mushroom At The End Of The World
Welcome to The Dossier #66, which, if you’re into numbers like I am is known as a master number, and her stage name - a power number. Thank you for being here. If this email was forwarded to you, get your own here:
Friends,
Good morning from me and a pair of whales on a morning cruise at Cape Point.
Here’s five things you may find interesting and/or meaningful.
1. Reading
"When Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945, it is said, the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom.”
Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world — and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. The Mushroom At The End Of The World offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing examines the relationship between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multi species landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.
2. Loving
Be still my South African heart : The Boxing Grannies of Johannesburg.
The Boxing Grannies are a group of elderly women who meet twice a week, early in the morning, to take part in a free session of boxing in Cosmo City, a township next to Johannesburg. With no under 65s allowed, the oldest “gogo” (the Zulu word for grandmother) is 85 years old (and still ready to take on anything Tommy Fury thinks he can bring to the ring) and the group is largely made up of locals who are members of the community and attend Church together.
3. Practising
What it looks like to leave social media.
4. A Quote
“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.”
via: this wonderful newsletter
5. Dramatic Trees
This is a dragon’s blood tree from the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen in the Arabian Sea.
See you next Sunday.