When we confront the foundations of our systems of learning and challenge the assumptions that underlie the design of culture, new opportunities for engagement between people and their environment are found waiting. Windows into the world's unlimited potential open, revealing that mediation of experience is untenable and the only limiting factor to innovation is creativity. Indeed, experimentation is always needed to find better alternatives. Without risk-taking, we'll never discover what's possible. Just as any historian of science knows, major advances in science are not made in small steps, but by leaps and bounds that are largely guided by intuition, chance, and a willingness to challenge dogmas. Often, these shifts come about by curious hobbyists. As Aristotle once stated, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Or, in other words, one should be both skeptical and open-minded, just not so open-minded that their brain falls out.

Peter McCoy, Radical Mycology, Toward a Radical Mycology (XVIII)

An ecological understanding allows us to identify "things"—rain, cloud, river—at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground below us moves in giant plates. It reminds us that—while it's useful to have a word for that thing called a cloud—when we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that sometimes intersect and hold together long enough to be a "cloud."