Heading into a post pandemic time, the privilege gap is widening and communities are suffering. We are now being asked to reimagine the shared spaces we build and how we build them. This project design is a template for a community space that transforms over time while offering hope for transformation, a temple for our shared loss and grief that becomes a community garden.
This type of temple was first built at Burning Man by David Best and others twenty years ago with the intention to create a space for people to grieve, and they have since been built around the world for and with communities in need. Typically, after a finite period of community engagement they were burned, but we’ve arrived at a moment in time when burning the temple is no longer viable. Instead, it must be regenerative and sustainable, made out of mycelium and organic byproducts that are beginning to reshape how we use and think about the planet’s resources.
Imagine a temple made out of this earthy, wonderful, microscopic organism, plus organic byproducts, to create something beautiful for the community. There are altars where people suffering from loss and grief can leave something. The altars and decorative parts of the temple are made from these mycelium-based products which are temporary but can remain for months or even a year. The bones are made of steel. After several months the altars are disassembled and composted into a beneficial mulch and will becomes part of the regenerative garden. This temple will sequester carbon rather than create more. The mycelium biodegrades but the structure remains. The surrounding areas are sustainable gardens with community groups participating in both edible and pollinator gardens which attract animal life. There might even be a preschool and a community center at the corners. It is about loss and grief, it is about love and sorrow transforming into gratitude. It is a place for children to explore and wonder at the butterfly on their finger, the hummingbird or wild bee. It can transform into a temple numerous times. The trees grow, the soil remains alive, the gardens evolve.
The temple offers a place to find healing in gratitude. The garden comes alive as the animals, beneficial insects, trees, pollinator plants, and living soil thrive. Over time add a community center, a preschool and a farmer’s market, for good health and healing for the community.
The temple is the heart of this garden, a place of beauty where personal and community stories are left.
Mylo is created by combining mycelium cells with a substrate of corn stalks and nutrients. Over 10 days the cells grow into the substrate, creating an interconnected mass that can be made into almost any size. The result is a material that looks and feels remarkably like animal leather. Yet Mylo can be produced in days versus years, without the material waste of using animal hides or the toxic chemicals used in producing synthetic leathers.
Sold now very exclusively... but soon to be available for special projects.... hint!
The monarch butterfly survives and thrives in milkweed. It lays eggs here and hatches as the caterpillar, it is where the caterpillar grows and can only nourish on the milkweed leaves, when fat enough turns into the chrysalis, the body completely dissolves into the nothingness of mucus and only then metamorphosis occurs, the chrysalis becomes translucent and the Monarch butterfly emerges– slowly moving its wings in front of the 4 year old child and then flies away on it epic 1000 mile migration. In the story of the monarch butterfly, the temple is milkweed, food for the transformational process. It is not romantic, magical thinking to see this arrival from the rubble and be overwhelmed with hope and gratitude.
When we see that the earth can heal itself with our smallest actions, we are inspired. Mycelium and milkweed are poetic reinforcements to a new path. Healing the planet and our relationship to it is as important as healing our hearts. The temple will contain that message. In helping to heal others, including mother earth, is the best way to heal ourselves. It starts with this wondrous young age of exploration and filtering hope and life, love and gratitude... the metamorphosis of a butterfly might be all you need to believe when you are two years old... and 30 years later when facing a life choice.
We remade Jenny Miller’s Garden Day Preschool so she could open during the pandemic. We planted 1” high milkweed in early July– here it is 3 months later
Current work in progress
