Culture

By 

Erin Bunch

Nov 26, 2021

3

 Minute read

Mycelium Threads Through 
Ondalinda, Mexico’s Hottest Festival

To foster connection, founder Lulu Luchaire unearthed nature's network.

“More than ever, I want people to feel connected—with each other, but also with the planet and with nature,” says Ondalinda founder Lulu Luchaire, who chose “Mycelium”—aka the underground network of mushroom “roots” that quietly powers the Earth’s ecosystem—as the theme of this past weekend’s festival.


Known as the World Wide Web of the natural world, mycelium served as a fitting thread for the annual gathering in Careyes, Mexico where global creatives come together to celebrate music, art, wellness, community, spirituality, and Mexican culture. When planning this year’s event centered around connection in a post-2020 world, Luchaire was initially inspired by the alienation she and so many others felt in the early stages of the pandemic and the subsequent realization of just how important we all are to one another. “I want people to understand that we're really one,” she says. She credits Louie Schwartzberg’s documentary Fantastic Fungi for the lightbulb moment that allowed her to encapsulate this sentiment in one word, after it introduced her to the marvels of mycelium.

For the uninitiated, mycelium is the largest organism on the planet, a network of fungal threads that help the mushrooms we see and eat to grow. But it’s so much more than that, too. Mycelium is nature’s great recycler, breaking down organic matter (and toxins, too) and enabling new life to sprout and thrive. “And it’s a communication system,” Luchaire says. “Trees use mycelium to talk to one another—how insane is that?”

“I’m so grateful for the mycelium network that brought us together at Ondalinda to share food, fun, and immersive experiences.” 



— Louie Schwartzberg, director of “Fantastic Fungi”

After watching the “stunning” documentary, Luchaire had a very specific vision that set the tone for Ondalinda’s 2021 return after its pandemic-induced hiatus. “I envisioned all the guests at Ondalinda sitting on the ground and putting their fingers deep into the soil to grab the mycelium,” she says. “Then I saw us all bringing it up together in the air for everyone to see that connection because we don’t see it most of the time, and it’s that detachment that creates negative space in between us, nature, and other humans.”


While Schwartzberg’s film served as a direct catalyst for the design of Ondalinda 2021, it was not Luchaire’s first touchpoint with the magic of mushrooms. For years, she has been utilizing functional mushrooms to enhance her overall well-being, and she has also experienced psilocybin rituals within the indigenous settings to which they have long belonged. “I feel very blessed to have had those opportunities. They've opened my heart, my spirituality, and my ability to connect to the world and other people,” she says. “If you work with these medicines, you really see how connected everything is.”


Luchaire’s intention to spread this feeling of “oneness” was woven into every aspect of this year’s event. Each evening of the four-day festival had its own connection-centric theme underscoring the mycelium motif. The final day culminated in a “fantastic fungi” night featuring mushroom art installations along with several activations, including a talk on psilocybin and brain health by neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, a workshop on making mushroom chocolate, and an introduction to Shroomboom by cofounder Alejandra Rodriguez. “The setup was mind-blowing,” says Rodriguez. “In this really special place, Lulu did exactly what she set out to accomplish—foster connection. I created relationships at Ondalinda that will last a very long time.”

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Ondalinda Festival

Ondalinda has been held in Careyes since its inception in 2016, but the connection between Mexico and mushrooms has an even more deeply rooted history. As Luchaire notes, pre-Hispanic cultures in the area used hallucinogenic mushrooms in healing ceremonies, and psilocybin first made its way to America via Mexican shamans who shared their rituals with visiting foreigners. One such “Wise One” was Maria Sabina, to whom an altar was dedicated at this year’s festival—just one of the ways Ondalinda has paid tribute to the indigenous and modern culture of its borrowed home. Every year, Luchaire makes it a point to showcase ancient traditions alongside modern art, fashion, food, and more at the event. “We always have a fashion pop-up featuring only Mexican designers, she says.

“A lot of international brands want to be included, but I stick to my guns because the whole point of Ondalinda is to showcase the beauty of Mexico and to give back to the people and land.”

To that end, every aspect of the festival is created and built locally, and any cultural experience included in the event is presented respectfully by those who practice it in real life. “We have guardians of those traditions, shamans and leaders of tribes,” she says. It can be tricky to showcase such practices—such as a temazcal, or traditional sweat lodge—she acknowledges, because they can be accidentally disrespected by well-intentioned festival attendees. But she says that for the shamans, it’s an opportunity to share, educate, and reach out to other cultures. “It’s not about saying you should live this way or that this shaman is right or wrong,” she says. “It’s just holding a space to share spiritual beliefs and practices.”


This exchange helps bridge the divide between people from different backgrounds, encouraging them to come together under the premise of a shared humanity. “People really connect at Ondalinda,” Luchaire says. “Companies have been started here. Weddings have happened. People find real connection.” And while the event is limited to 600 people each year, Luchaire hopes to expand its impact through her charitable venture, Planet Buyback, a collective of five communities, including Ondalinda, that work together to fund conservation projects protecting habitats, culture, and the planet.


Luchaire acknowledges the challenges of getting people to care about things that aren’t happening directly in their own backyard or to people they know and love, but she has designed Ondalinda and it’s growing “mycelium” to inspire that kind of connection—to nature, animals, and other human beings. And that goal of reunifying people was particularly important to her when planning this year’s festival after nearly two years of forced separation, in a time when humanity feels more divided than ever. “We really need to reconnect, because we’ve all lived something that’s very traumatic and that has impacted everyone on this little planet,” she says. “Now is a good opportunity to rethink how we organize ourselves as a society, and mycelium was quite a poetic way to express that reconnection and that oneness.”

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Ondalinda Festival

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