≋✺̱ Penis Envy & African Pyramid: Fungi, Body + Ecological Attunement
- Kiing Curry
- 1 day ago
- 17 min read
Where something begins speaking is not necessarily where the relationship ends.
The network extends.
Fungi Tings is a living inquiry into fungi as medicine, relationship, and liberation praxis for Black bodies. I trace what becomes knowable when fungi are approached not as spectacle, optimization, or escape, but as a relationship capable of changing how we perceive the body, nervous system, gut, memory, lineage, environment, and one another.
This is where I follow what the body reveals—and what becomes possible when that knowledge is taken seriously.
≋✺̱ Penis Envy & African Pyramid: Fungi, Body + Ecological Attunement
≋✺̱ Fungi Tings Field Notes — Penis Envy, African Pyramid & What the Body Is Actually Saying
Ecological Attunement Means I Have to Know Who I Am in Relationship With
The deeper I move into Mycelial Sankofa, the less interested I become in asking simply what fungi does.
That question is too small.
What happens between us?
What does this particular fungi bring forward in this particular body, under these particular conditions, at this particular moment?
What changes when the fungi changes?
What changes when the land it emerged from changes?
What changes when the body receiving it carries a different history?
And what happens when I return again?
That is ecological attunement.
Not forcing identical conditions so I can prove that something happens the same way every time.
Returning with the same quality of attention.
Body.
Organism.
Environment.
Context.
History.
Dose.
Food.
Movement.
Cannabis.
Sleep.
Fear.
Memory.
Whatever else has entered the ecosphere since the last time I was here.
Consistency is not sameness.
Consistency is attention becoming second skin.
And when I bring that attention to two fungi relationships that have become particularly important in my praxis—Penis Envy and African Pyramid—I am not describing two versions of the same psychedelic experience.
I am describing two relationships.
And they did not teach me the same way.
Penis Envy Did Not Get Its Name Because of Your Dick
We can begin there because apparently we need to.
Penis Envy is a cultivated variety of Psilocybe cubensis.
And yes, its name is exactly as unserious as it sounds.
It comes from the morphology of the mushroom.
The thick stem.
The bulbous cap.
The decidedly phallic appearance.
That is the relationship between the penis and Penis Envy.
Recently, somebody told me that Penis Envy was doing something to their dick, with the implication that perhaps this was simply something Penis Envy does.
No.
And what interests me about that statement is actually much larger than whether somebody misunderstood the name of a mushroom.
Because if fungi repeatedly directs your attention toward your sexual organs, the interesting question is not:
What is this strain doing to my sexual organs?
The interesting question is:
Why did my body bring me here?
That is an entirely different orientation.
And that distinction is the difference between consumption and relationship.
Sensation Is Information. It Is Not Automatically Instruction.
This is especially important when we are talking about Black bodies.
Because Black bodies have never been allowed neutral sexuality inside the colonial imagination.
We have been hypersexualized.
Animalized.
Fetishized.
Pathologized.
Made simultaneously sexually available and sexually dangerous.
Black men have been constructed through myths of excessive sexual appetite and sexual threat.
Black women and femmes have been constructed as inherently sexually available while being denied protection from sexual violence.
Queer and trans Black bodies inherit another architecture of surveillance, desirability, disgust, fetishization and punishment.
That architecture does not magically disappear because somebody ate mushrooms.
You brought your body into the experience.
Which means you also brought what has happened to that body.
You brought what you were taught about it.
You brought what other people projected onto it.
You brought desire.
Shame.
Performance.
Fear.
Pleasure.
Violation.
Gender.
Power.
Rejection.
Longing.
Memory.
You brought the entire ecology.
So yes.
Some people encountering fungi may feel enormous sensation around their genitals or elsewhere in the body.
Mine was in my gut.
Some people may experience increased sexual sensation.
Some may experience less.
Some may experience numbness.
Some may suddenly become intensely aware of an area of their body they barely noticed before.
The sensation matters.
But sensation is not the same thing as explanation.
And sensation certainly is not permission to reach immediately for the nearest cultural stereotype and call that knowledge.
If fungi brings your attention repeatedly to your sexual organs, maybe the question is not whether you are hornier or not.
Maybe the question is what lives there.
What have you been taught about sexuality?
What happened there?
What are you afraid of?
Where does shame live?
Where does performance live?
Where does masculinity live?
Where does femininity live?
Where does desirability live?
Where does rejection live?
Where does violence live?
Where does pleasure live?
Where have you confused access with relationship?
Where have you confused sensation with instruction?
Where have you confused being desired with being known?
What is your body asking you to finally notice?
Because that is what happened to me with fear.
Penis Envy Found the Fear First
When I first began working with fungi, Penis Envy was considered one of the more potent Psilocybe cubensis varieties available to me.
And it felt potent.
But potency is not actually the most useful language I have for the relationship anymore.
After moving through other fungi relationships, Penis Envy now sits somewhere closer to the middle of my experiential range.
That does not make the earlier experience incorrect.
It means my relationship changed.
My body changed.
My capacity changed.
My reference points changed.
Mycelial Sankofa is perspectival.
Rotate the network and something else comes into view.
What remains striking about Penis Envy is not simply how intense it was.
It is where it went.
Fear.
Immediately.
Not abstract anxiety.
Not spooky mushroom shit.
Fear with architecture.
Fear with history.
A fear that felt three dimesionally palpable once the plant hit my system.
Fear that knew something about being Black in America before I had assembled all of the language I now possess for describing it.
Penis Envy began excavating the buried recognition:
I am a Black body in this place, and this place has not been built to keep me safe.
That recognition was already in my body.
Fungi did not invent it.
Fungi did not place it there.
It revealed something already moving through the network.
And once that material surfaced, I could not simply unknow it.
That is part of why I resist describing psychedelic experience as escape.
Sometimes fungi does the exact opposite.
Sometimes it makes disappearing from yourself considerably more difficult.
My Field Notes Read Penis Envy as a Whole-Body Fungi
This is where I want to make my own position extremely clear.
I understand Penis Envy as a whole-body fungi relationship.
That is my observation.
My field research.
My embodied expertise developed through returning, observing, comparing and remaining in relationship.
Whole-body does not mean every part of the body suddenly starts screaming at once.
It means the relationship is not confined to one predetermined organ, symptom or emotional category.
It can enter through the place where the network is presently asking for attention.
For me, that entry point was fear and the stomach.
For someone else, the first signal may arrive through grief.
Or sexuality.
Or muscular tension.
Or memory.
Or shame.
Or sensory processing.
Or something they cannot yet name.
The place where the fungi first becomes perceptible is not necessarily the boundary of what it is working with.
It may be the gate.
And that distinction has become central to my fungi praxis.
Where something begins speaking is not necessarily where the relationship ends.
The network extends.
Western Medicine Can Study the Molecule Without Knowing the Relationship
This is also why I remain interested in the increasing medical and scientific attention surrounding psilocybin while remaining deeply suspicious of the architecture surrounding that attention.
Western medicine can isolate psilocybin.
Measure dosage.
Track neurological activity.
Design clinical protocols.
Study depression.
Study addiction.
Study anxiety.
Study trauma.
Produce data.
And some of that research may be extraordinarily useful.
But Mycelial Sankofa keeps asking a different question:
What relationship becomes possible because the fungi returned?
Because extracting a compound from fungi and demonstrating that the compound can produce a therapeutic outcome does not mean we have learned from fungi.
A substance can help someone while the architecture surrounding that substance remains intact.
The bridge can exist.
The connection can still be absent.
This is precisely where ecological attunement matters.
I am not only asking whether Penis Envy produced an outcome.
I am observing where it entered the network.
What surfaced.
What resisted.
What returned later.
What became possible because I noticed.
And what relationships had to change once I could no longer pretend I had not noticed.
And Then African Pyramid Entered Differently
African Pyramid was different.
I first encountered it in Canada through FunGuyz.
It is also described in the marketplace as a Psilocybe cubensis variety associated with South African genetics, often linked commercially with South African Transkei.
And eventually, I want to cultivate it myself.
I want to continue this relationship.
African Pyramid is one of the fungi I can imagine becoming legacy inside my praxis.
Penis Envy excavated.
African Pyramid seemed to know how quickly I could dig.
That difference changed everything.
The Land Entered the Relationship
One of the patterns I have repeatedly documented with fungi is geographic.
When I am working with genetics understood to have emerged from particular geographic ecologies, my visual and embodied experiences have often carried relationships to those places.
I have noticed it with fungi associated with India.
With Southeast Asia.
With North and South American geographies.
And then I encountered African Pyramid.
For the first time, I was encountering fungi associated with a land I understand as part of my ancestral geography.
A place I have never physically been.
And my body responded differently.
I need to be precise about what I am saying here.
I am documenting an embodied relationship.
And ecological attunement requires me to resist flattening what I experienced simply because I cannot reduce it to a laboratory measurement.
Something in that encounter felt recognizable.
Not familiar in the sense of I have seen this before.
Recognizable in the sense of:
my body did not seem to require the same introduction.
African Pyramid Did Not Refuse the Trauma. It Changed the Pace.
This is what I keep returning to.
African Pyramid was gentle with me.
Not shallow.
Not recreational.
Not easier because there was less material.
Gentle.
There is a difference.
It still excavated trauma.
It still brought me into material I had avoided.
It still moved through grief and fear and memory.
But it did so at a pace my Black body could sustain.
That is one of the clearest distinctions I can make between these relationships.
Penis Envy felt like:
We are going.
African Pyramid felt like:
I know. Come with me.
A let's go together, which allowed for a deep joy experience as well.
Both moved.
Both excavated.
Both revealed.
But one relationship seemed more attentive to my capacity while the material was being revealed.
Looking backward, I sometimes wonder whether Penis Envy accelerated a journey I did not yet understand I had begun.
Once the excavation started, I could not stop it.
African Pyramid showed me another possibility.
Healing did not require less depth.
It required a different pace.
Pace Is Part of Relationship
Western models of healing are obsessed with outcome.
Did symptoms decrease?
Did functioning improve?
How quickly?
How much?
Can the intervention be replicated?
Can the result be measured?
Can we get somebody back to work?
Ecological attunement asks something else.
What did the organism have to survive in order to reach the outcome?
That question changes how I understand intensity.
A fungi experience can be transformational and still move too quickly for the body receiving it.
An experience can surface something true without giving the body enough ecology to integrate what became visible.
That does not necessarily make the encounter harmful.
But it does mean intensity cannot be our only measurement of efficacy.
Deeper is not always better.
Faster is not always better.
More visual is not always better.
More destabilizing is not evidence that something is doing more work.
Sometimes the most sophisticated relationship is the one capable of noticing:
this body can only receive this much right now.
That is tending.
The Mushroom Is Not a Personality Quiz
This is also why I become increasingly cautious about people casually interpreting psychedelic experiences for themselves and then turning those interpretations into universal truths.
“My (insert whatever ting) felt weird on Penis Envy.”
Okay.
That happened.
Now observe it.
Do not immediately build mythology around it.
Do not turn one bodily sensation into a pharmacological claim.
Do not turn a mushroom’s ridiculous name into an explanation.
And particularly when the body involved is Black, do not unknowingly drag centuries of colonial sexual mythology into a psychedelic experience and call the result spiritual insight.
That is not liberation.
That is coloniality wearing tie-dye.
Fungi does not automatically decolonize anybody.
Psilocybin does not magically remove misogyny.
It does not dissolve anti-Blackness.
It does not cure transphobia.
It does not make somebody relational.
It does not prevent somebody from reproducing violence.
A person can have an extraordinary psychedelic experience and return with every hierarchy they entered with.
Maybe with prettier language for it.
That is precisely why I keep extreme distance from some people engaging fungi.
Access to fungi is not evidence of relationship with fungi.
And transformation is not demonstrated by how profound somebody says their trip was.
I want to know what changed in the ecology afterward.
How do you treat bodies?
How do you receive boundaries?
How do you understand consent?
What happens when somebody else’s body contradicts your interpretation?
Can you recognize information without immediately possessing it?
Can you encounter something sacred without turning it into another product, identity or performance?
Did the network actually change?
Ecological Attunement Happens After the Fungi Leaves
This may be the most important thing fungi has taught me.
The experience is not the entire relationship.
Eventually the visual field settles.
Eventually the body metabolizes the compounds.
Eventually you eat.
Sleep.
Wake up.
Return to your house.
Your spouse.
Your community.
Your work.
Your habits.
Your contradictions.
Your wounds.
Your responsibilities.
And now we find out whether anything actually happened.
Because ecological attunement is not simply noticing what fungi shows me.
It is building an ecosphere capable of receiving what became perceptible.
Once Penis Envy and African Pyramid began excavating what was happening between my body and food, I could no longer pretend I did not notice it.
That relationship became I Eat Tings.
And once I was tending I Eat Tings closely enough, my body began making another relationship visible: some of the food I had been taught to eat was part of what was disrupting the ecology.
So the network moved again.
Decolonizing the Palate.
Fungi excavated what was happening with my breath. My regulation. My need for movement. The electricity moving through and sometimes getting trapped inside my body.
That became I Move Tings.
These are not separate projects that happened to emerge from the same person.
They are relationships inside the same Bespokecurry ecosphere.
One relationship made another perceptible.
That relationship required another.
And another.
Food changed movement.
Movement changed regulation.
Regulation changed what I could perceive.
What I could perceive changed how I returned to fungi.
The network kept expanding because the information had somewhere to go.
That is what I mean when I say Mycelial Sankofa is perspectival. Rotate the network and something else comes into view.
If fungi shows me that my body needs something and I continually refuse to provide it, the network stops.
If fungi reveals a wound and I convert the wound into an aesthetic rather than tending it, the network stops.
If fungi increases my perception but I remain incapable of building relationships that can receive what I perceive, the network stops.
Gifts require ecology.
This is where Mycelial Sankofa becomes larger than psychedelics.
The question is no longer:
What did the mushroom show me?
The question becomes:
What relationships become possible because it returned?
And then:
What static from the present will try to make what returned illegible before it can be fully integrated into the future ecosphere?
That is the work.
Two Fungi. Two Relationships. One Network.
Penis Envy taught me that fungi can find the buried thing quickly.
African Pyramid taught me that finding it quickly is not necessarily the only way to heal it.
Penis Envy brought fear into view.
African Pyramid changed my understanding of pace.
Neither relationship cancels the other.
Neither becomes the better mushroom.
That would reproduce the same ranking system I am trying to leave.
Instead, they become coordinates.
Different relationships inside the same expanding network.
And the more relationships I build, the more precisely I can perceive what each one is actually doing.
That is ecological attunement.
Return.
Observe.
Notice what changed.
Return differently.
Notice again.
Eventually attention becomes second skin.
And maybe that is why African Pyramid becoming a legacy fungi matters to me.
Legacy is not simply preservation.
It is relationship sustained long enough for knowledge to move between generations.
It is being able to return to something rather than constantly being forced toward novelty.
It is tending a relationship long enough that the organism is no longer merely something I consumed once.
It becomes part of the network through which I know.
The Fungi Did Not Tell Me What My Body Meant
That distinction may be the center of the whole field note.
Penis Envy did not tell me:
You are afraid.
African Pyramid did not tell me:
You are African.
Fungi is not a fortune teller.
My body communicated.
Fungi changed the conditions under which I could perceive what it was communicating.
That is different.
And it places responsibility back where it belongs.
With me.
I have to listen.
I have to observe.
I have to distinguish sensation from interpretation.
I have to learn when something is memory and when something is projection.
I have to notice what changes across fungi, dose, environment, food, cannabis, movement, sleep and time.
I have to return.
I have to remain willing to discover that something I thought I understood six months ago looks completely different now.
Mycelial Sankofa is perspectival.
Rotate the network.
Something else comes into view.
The relationship changes the observer.
The observer changes the relationship.
It becomes knowledge through tending.
Through integration.
Through relationship.
Through what I do differently after I know.
That is why I am less interested in asking what a mushroom does to you.
I want to know what became perceptible while you were together.
And whether you built an ecology capable of receiving what returned.
Cosmos Watershed
Penis Envy found the fear first.
African Pyramid changed the pace.
Both are Psilocybe cubensis. Both excavated deeply. Neither entered relationship with my body in the same way.
This Fungi Tings Field Note moves beyond potency, strain personality and the idea that a psychedelic experience can be understood by what happened while the fungi was active. Through Penis Envy, African Pyramid, Mycelial Sankofa and Ecological Attunement, I am asking what the body makes perceptible in relationship with fungi—and what happens to that information after the fungi leaves.
Because sensation is information. It is not automatically instruction.
Penis Envy taught me that the whole body can be reached through one very specific door. African Pyramid taught me that the door does not have to be kicked in.
And neither relationship ended with the mushroom.
They moved into food. Breath. Movement. Regulation. Blackness. Geography. Fear. History. The ways I tend my body now.
The fungi excavated.
The ecosphere had to learn how to receive what returned.
Watershed
Watershed | Tributaries |
Watershed | ≋✺̱ Fungi Tings |
Relationship | Fungi ↔ Black Body ↔ Place ↔ Fear ↔ Trauma ↔ Sensation ↔ Food ↔ Movement ↔ Regulation ↔ Integration |
Hom(e)ie | ≋✺ The Six Waters — Cannabis |
Origin | Repeated embodied relationships with Penis Envy and African Pyramid, and the recognition that two Psilocybe cubensis relationships could excavate deep bodily material through radically different pathways and tempos. |
Expansion | From “what did this mushroom do?” toward “what became perceptible while we were together, where did the relationship enter, how did it move, and what ecology could receive what returned?” |
Application | Fungi Tings Field Notes; psychedelic integration; embodied observation; Black psychedelic praxis; Ecological Attunement; longitudinal strain relationship; geographic and bodily recognition. |
Lineage | Mycelial Sankofa → Ecological Attunement → Fungi Tings → I Eat Tings → Decolonizing the Palate → I Move Tings → The Body Electric |
Counter Currents | Strain determinism; potency-as-depth; psychedelic universalism; sensation-as-instruction; sexual stereotyping; hypersexualization of Black bodies; extraction without relationship; psychedelic experience without integration; novelty over repeated relationship. |
Cosmos Coordinates
Coordinate | Entry |
Primary Current | ≋✺̱ Fungi Tings |
Methodological Current | Ecological Attunement |
Network Orientation | Mycelial Sankofa |
Primary Organisms | Penis Envy + African Pyramid |
Species | Psilocybe cubensis |
Primary Body | Black embodied knowing |
Primary Movement | Excavation → Perception → Recognition → Integration → Return |
Primary Tension | Sensation vs. interpretation |
Secondary Tension | Potency vs. depth |
Relational Tension | Excavation vs. sustainable pace |
Geographic Current | Fungi lineage ↔ land ↔ visual experience ↔ ancestral relationship |
Penis Envy Coordinate | Whole-body relationship entering through specificity; fear as the first major site of excavation in my praxis. |
African Pyramid Coordinate | Deep excavation through gentleness, sustainable pace, geographic recognition and a developing legacy relationship. |
Integration Coordinate | What becomes perceptible through fungi must have somewhere to move after the fungi leaves. |
Ecosphere | Fungi ↔ Body ↔ Food ↔ Breath ↔ Movement ↔ Cannabis ↔ Regulation ↔ History ↔ Land ↔ Community |
Central Question | What became perceptible while we were together? |
Mycelial Question | What relationships become possible because it returned? |
Future-Ecosphere Question | What static from the present will try to make what returned illegible before it can be fully integrated into the future ecosphere? |
Constellations
Constellation | Relationship |
Penis Envy ↔ Fear | The first major fungi relationship to make buried fear unmistakably perceptible: not generic psychedelic fear, but the embodied recognition of being a Black body inside a place that has never guaranteed its safety. |
Penis Envy ↔ Whole Body | My developing field theory that Penis Envy can operate as a whole-body fungi relationship, entering through the bodily site where unresolved material is presently most perceptible and moving outward through the larger ecology. |
Sexual Organs ↔ Information | Increased, decreased, unusual or newly perceptible genital sensation is information to observe—not proof that a strain has a special sexual-organ function and not automatic instruction about what the sensation means. |
Black Body ↔ Hypersexualization | Psychedelic experience does not remove the cultural architecture through which Black sexuality has been fetishized, animalized, surveilled and made available. That architecture can enter interpretation unless it is consciously examined. |
Penis Envy ↔ African Pyramid | Two relationships capable of deep excavation without producing the same pace, entrance, visual language or bodily experience. |
African Pyramid ↔ Gentleness | Evidence inside my praxis that gentleness and depth are not opposites. Deep excavation does not require overwhelm. |
African Pyramid ↔ Geography | An embodied and visual relationship with fungi associated with South African geography that felt qualitatively different from prior geographically rooted fungi encounters. |
African Pyramid ↔ Legacy | A fungi relationship I want to sustain across time and, if circumstances allow, eventually extend into cultivation and tending. |
Ecological Attunement ↔ Return | Methodological consistency resides in returning with depth and quality of attention rather than forcing identical conditions or outcomes. |
Mycelial Sankofa ↔ Perspective | A later relationship changes what can be perceived in an earlier one. African Pyramid allows Penis Envy to be seen differently; Penis Envy changes what becomes perceptible through African Pyramid. |
Fungi ↔ I Eat Tings | Fungal excavation made bodily relationships with food increasingly impossible to deny, allowing food to become another site of sustained relational study. |
I Eat Tings ↔ Decolonizing the Palate | Attending to food revealed that some inherited eating relationships were themselves disrupting the ecology, requiring another movement in the network. |
Fungi ↔ I Move Tings | Excavation around breath, regulation, sensory experience and bodily electricity made movement another necessary site of relationship. |
Gift ↔ Ecology | What fungi reveals cannot become integrated knowledge simply because it surfaced. Gifts require an ecology capable of receiving them. |
Constellation Movement
Penis Envy → fear becomes perceptible → fear reveals architecture → architecture reaches body → body reaches food → food reaches regulation → regulation reaches movement → movement changes what the body can perceive → changed perception changes the next fungi relationship
African Pyramid enters that existing network.
It does not begin another one.
That is why the two fungi cannot be reduced to separate strain reviews.
≋✺̱ Penis Envy & African Pyramid: Fungi, Body + Ecological Attunement
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