Our Ancestors Want Us to Be Mushrooms: Wisdom for Living in Balance with the Planet and Each Other

“We desperately need the medicine offered in this book, and I am so grateful for the guidance of Madison Murphy Barney, who reminds us that we are not just connected to ourselves and to one another, but to the universe of networks and beings who hold and tend to us just as we tend to them. In a world marked by rampant individualism and disconnection, we need paths of healing that restore us to community care in the deepest of ways. Recognizing that our ancestors want us to be mushrooms will help us forge that sacred path together. Read this book, and let it heal you.” —Kaitlin B Curtice, Potawatomi author of Native and Everything Is a Story and director of the Aki Institute  “What if the answers aren’t above us, but beneath our feet? In this tender, imaginative book, mushrooms become a guide for living with more care, reciprocity, and wonder. Drawing on ancestral memory and the quiet wisdom of the natural world, Madison Murphy Barney traces a path toward a life shaped by cycles, connection, and attention to what’s already here. A small, luminous call to return. Barney has a way of making the reader feel like they are just walking with her through the woods, learning about the ways we are all interconnected.” —Cody Cook-Parrott, artist and author of The Practice of Attention