Entangled Life: A Kripalu Journey into the Wood Wide Web with Merlin Sheldrake and Micah Mortali

In just a few short years, the idea that a forest is connected at its roots by vast fungal networks—facilitating the transfer of nutrients, water, and information—has entered the public imagination. Lovingly called the “wood wide web,” this discovery came into our collective awareness at the same moment a parallel human-built network was electronically connecting the world. The resonance between these two systems is striking.

When Nature and Technology Mirror Each Other

The research that revealed this underground ecology inspired the film Avatar, and the scientist who helped bring it to light, Suzanne Simard, served as a consultant on the film. It is fitting that we came to call the human network the “world wide web.” Since the turn of the century, these two systems—one human-made, the other more-than-human—have begun reflecting each other back to us like mirrors. One black, and one green. One reflecting the sum of human knowledge and learning; the other reflecting the intelligence of Creation itself—the energy and organizing force that sustains all life.

Before the discovery of mycorrhizal fungal networks, trees were largely understood as individuals, drawing water and nutrients independently from the soil. The reality is far more entangled.

Old forests, supported by fungi, function as living systems in which trees are connected through mycorrhizal networks and share resources. In some cases, when deeply networked old trees lose their ability to photosynthesize—when their trunks and branches are gone—neighboring trees continue to nourish the remaining stumps, keeping them alive so they can persist as nodes in the network. I have witnessed this myself in the eastern hemlock forest at Kripalu. It is astonishing.

The Strange Intelligence of Fungi

Fungi themselves defy easy categorization. They are more like animals than plants: they do not photosynthesize but instead consume and transform what surrounds them. They decompose wood, build soil, and sustain ecosystems. Their fruiting bodies—the mushrooms we see—are only the visible edge of a vast, mostly subterranean life form.

In his New York Times bestselling book Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake guides us into this hidden world of fungal intelligence, complexity, and relationship.

Fungi invite us into what Thich Nhat Hanh called “inter-being.” They soften the boundaries between self and other, organism and environment, and reveal a living system of reciprocity and cooperation beneath our feet.

Learning to See the World as Entangled

We are excited to announce that Merlin Sheldrake is coming to Kripalu for a unique program where Merlin will open new doorways of perception through the wisdom of fungi and his deep understanding of these remarkable life forms. I will help translate those insights into embodied experience on the land itself—grounding ideas in movement, presence, and place. This is Entangled Life in the body, on the land, and in community.