Emergence Magazine Podcast
by Emergence Magazine
Emergence Magazine is an award-winning magazine exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture and spirituality. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, author-narrated essays, fiction, multipart series, and more. We feature new podcast episodes biweekly on Tuesdays.
Episodes
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The World Is a Prism, Not a Window – A Conversation with Zoë Schlanger
Resonating with our new Seeds and Structures theme, our interview with Zoë Schlanger on her book The Light Eaters questions what it might mean to embrace plant intelligence within the framework of Western science. From roots that can sense the sound of running water to flowers that memorize the...
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Protecting Bahsahwahbee: A Living Refuge for the Ancestors – Josh Jackson
Writer Josh Jackson follows Newe elders Delaine and Rick Spilsbury through the histories and possible futures of Bashahwahbee—a sacred grove of Rocky Mountain junipers in far eastern Nevada. Fed by rare springs in an otherwise arid high desert landscape, these trees carry both memories of Newe...
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How the Pacific Makes Love to the Rockies - David James Duncan
For seven decades, David James Duncan has immersed himself in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies, coming to know them as places of earthly holiness. Spawning salmon, chittering otters, water ouzels, and humans mucking about in streams have revealed themselves to be not only...
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A Seasonal Practice of Fermentation – Sandor Ellix Katz
This week is the beginning of a new biweekly rhythm to our podcast, which we’re marking with a story all about fermentation: a practice that invites us to participate in the slow, and enjoy what can emerge from it. Fermentation revivalist Sandor Ellix Katz invites us to bring ancient traditions…
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Communion Is Alive – A Conversation on Spiritual Ecology with Stephen Blackmer, Susan Murphy, Bonnie Nadzam, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
This conversation brings together four practitioners from Sufi, Christian, and Buddhist traditions to examine how the values of spiritual ecology are embedded within their different faiths. Drawing upon the themes within Remembering Earth, the new book by Emergence founding editor Emmanuel...
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Prayer: A Remembering Earth Practice
We conclude our Remembering Earth summer practice series with this episode on prayer. No matter what form it takes, prayer is our own way of speaking with the divine. It reveals the unique note of offering we each hold in our hearts, and is ultimately a space where we can be in communion. Working...
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Time: A Remembering Earth Practice
When we recognize each form of creation as its own cycle of time, the illusion of linearity is laid bare and we can again begin to see how the Earth and everything in it is made of countless interlocking relationships. This episode of our Remembering Earth series invites you to walk with the...
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Listening: A Remembering Earth Practice
As much as we have engulfed the Earth in the noise of modern life, She is always singing beneath the din of our human world. If we place our attention there, we can begin to uncover the ancient ties of kinship that were woven into us through song and sound over millennia. Building on the breath…
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Step: A Remembering Earth Practice
Throughout the ages, many cultures have understood the importance of walking as a vehicle of transformation. Pilgrims journey in a state of reflection and prayer, often experiencing a profound sense of embodied devotion. This episode of our Remembering Earth practice series engages you in the...
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Heart: A Remembering Earth Practice
The mystics say we have a physical heart and a spiritual heart, the latter being a center of energy that can be accessed in many ways. While mysterious, the love that flows through the spiritual heart can be felt in our physical hearts, for both are spaces where inner meets outer. Part of our...
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Breath: A Remembering Earth Practice
Our series of Remembering Earth audio practices begins with an episode all about breath. We share breath with plants, trees, oceans, and animals. It is the great connector, bringing us into a cycle of reciprocity with the more-than-human world. Across spiritual traditions, breath practices are...
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A Primordial Covenant of Relationship – Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
When we are broken open by grief and love at the immense loss we are witnessing, the memory of a primordial bond with the Earth can awaken within our heart. Listen to this excerpt from Remembering Earth, a new book by Emergence founder and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, which explores how our...
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Animals in the Room – Melanie Challenger
How might our decision-making systems work differently if they were adapted to receive input from the more-than-human world? In this archive story, writer and ethicist Melanie Challenger examines the staggering expressive capacities of Earth's creatures, from the subtle vocalizations of turtles…
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Fifty-Eight Faces of California Spring – Forrest Gander
Reciting an excerpt from his poem, “Fifty-Eight Faces of California Spring,” Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and translator Forrest Gander travels through California’s many counties to offer a geologic atlas of this vast region in spring. Speaking the language of rock—alluvium, quartzite…
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A Glorian Is a Moment of Grace — A Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams
In this intimate conversation, Terry Tempest Williams contemplates what spiritual life looks like in a burning world. How do we respond to what the Earth is calling us to dream into being? How do we bring this and the destructive mentality of our time together in prayer? Sharing her ongoing work…
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Five Hundred Words and Thirty-Two Words for Field – Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Manchán Magan
This week’s episode features two stories that show how languages tied to land can transcend the duality between our inner and outer worlds. In “Five Hundred Words,” Marie Mutuski Mockett considers what may become of the timeless tradition of haiku, nurtured over generations, when the seasonal…
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The Thread of Belonging - Dara McAnulty
With his signature joy, Irish author and naturalist Dara McAnulty praises the arrival of curlew song in spring, emerging emperor dragonflies, feet crunching on fallen leaves, and the sweeping flight of a barn owl on a midsummer evening. This ode to experiencing the seasons as a natural flowing of...
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In Defense of Generation(s) – Stephanie Krzywonos
When we increasingly turn to AI to produce written work with just the click of a button, we risk not only eroding our capacity to imagine and give form to ideas, but we also strip writing of the mysterious process that makes it alive and meaningful. This week, Stephanie Krzywonos explores how the...
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Song of the Cedars – A Conversation with Giuliana Furci, Robert Macfarlane, César Rodríguez-Garavito, and Cosmo Sheldrake
In 2022, during a field trip to Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador, mycologist Giuliana Furci, author Robert Macfarlane, legal scholar and More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, and musician Cosmo Sheldrake wrote and recorded “Song of the Cedars”: a composition...
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An Ethics of Wild Mind – A Conversation with David Hinton
If the very act of seeing distances us from the living world, how can ancient modes of seeing and being help us navigate our era of disconnection? This week we return to our conversation with poet, translator, and author David Hinton as part of our exploration of the seasons. Drawing on Taoist…
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The Scaffolding of Life: Cyclical Structures of a Forest — A Conversation with Suzanne Simard
How can we put our emerging knowledge around forest systems into practice? In this episode, renowned forest ecologist Suzanne Simard returns to the podcast to talk about her latest book, When the Forest Breathes, and her decades-long Mother Tree Project, which integrates Western science and...
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Song of the Seasons: A Meditation on Cycles, Story, and Humility – by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
This special episode features the audio edition of our new pocket book, Song of the Seasons, by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, which offers a meditation on how the sacred nature of the seasons reveals itself to us in every moment and asks us to respond from a place of gratitude and humility. Like the…
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Wildflower Beauty and the Search for Home – by David George Haskell
This week, biologist David George Haskell brings us into the tangled histories and biological rhythms of four wildflowers that grow around his home in Atlanta, Georgia, revealing how each is rooted within webs of innovative, reciprocal relationships between hummingbirds, puddles, bee tongues, and...
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Making Light: An Invitation… – by Kerri ní Dochartaigh
This week, Irish author Kerri ní Dochartaigh offers an evocation on how we might hold the duality of lightness and darkness in a world increasingly divided. When fear and loss are pervasive, how do we engage with the life that remains? Can we see experiences of grief as invitations into feeling…
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A Thousand Ways to Live Within the Seasons — A Conversation with David G. Haskell, Dara McAnulty, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
In this second episode of our seasons conversation series, Volume 6 contributors David G. Haskell and Dara McAnulty explore how our senses shape myriad experiences of the seasons, some collective and some deeply personal. Finding wonder in the symbolism of daffodils in spring, carnivals of...
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Summer Light: A Failed Essay in Four Parts – Jake Skeets
This week, Diné poet Jake Skeets brings us into the rising dust, big sky, and bent light of summers on the Navajo Nation, and explores how the body is not separate from the seasons, rather one of the many terrains upon which they play out. Now living amid excessive heat warnings, sandstorms, and...
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On the Road with Thomas Merton – Fred Bahnson
For Christian mystic Thomas Merton, the sacred and the profane were continuous: all was alive with divine presence. Stands of redwoods were his cathedral, the sky, birds, and wind were his prayers, and the silence of the forest his lover. This week, we return to an essay by Fred Bahnson, who...
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The Springing Time – Melanie Challenger
Can we learn from more-than-human beings how to bring our bodies into a more direct conversation with the seasons? In this week’s story, bioethics and history researcher Melanie Challenger explores how our culture insulates us from experiencing seasonal signals in the natural world, ultimately...
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Echoic Memory – CMarie Fuhrman
This week, author and poet CMarie Fuhrman listens to the forest speak its old stories through the roll of thunder, the river emptied of salmon, and the howl of wolves in Idaho’s remote Frank Church Wilderness. In these sounds and silences, she remembers the people and knowledge that colonial...
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A Hollow Bone – Terry Tempest Williams
In a season of loss, how does absence offer a greater understanding of presence? This week, Terry Tempest Williams brings us into her love affair with Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a place that nourishes twelve million migrating birds, bison herds, and deep-rooted human communities, and which is now in...
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Tortoise Station – Lydia Millet
Depicting a distant age in which river guardians, mothmen, and condor trackers strive to protect a dying world, novelist Lydia Millet asks whether we can navigate species loss not through visions of saviors, but through patient devotion to what might yet emerge through care. Amid extreme...
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Memory of Winter – Zoë Schlanger
For plants, the moment of spring emergence is the gamble of their lives, says journalist Zoë Schlanger. They rely on a convergence of genetic instructions from within and environmental cues from without to know when it is time to bring new life into the world. But what happens when seasonal…
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Theia – Brian Isett
In this week’s story, biologist Brian Isett ponders the age-old question his young daughter will inevitably ask — Where did the Moon come from? — and uncovers how the Earth got Her seasonal song. He introduces us to Theia, the proto-planet that came crashing into the surface of our infant planet...
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The Heart of Requiem – A Conversation with Susan Murphy Roshi, Terry Tempest Williams, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Sharing a depth of attention for what stands to be lost in our relationship with the seasons, Volume 6 contributors Terry Tempest Williams and Susan Murphy Roshi come together to explore the theme of requiem in this first conversation of a companion series to Seasons. Drawing on their respective...
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Learning to Listen to Plants – A Conversation with Monica Gagliano
How might our understanding of plants transform if it embraced the voices of plants themselves? In this conversation, research scientist Monica Gagliano speaks about her groundbreaking research on plant communication and cognition, informed by knowledge imparted by plants through visions, dreams,...
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A River Reborn: Eco-Cultural Revitalization on the Klamath – Ben Goldfarb
Journalist Ben Goldfarb follows the winding course of the Klamath River, from Oregon’s high desert plateaus to the Pacific Ocean in Northern California, as its four most obstructive dams are dismantled under a restoration plan reopening hundreds of miles of salmon spawning habitat. Ben chronicles...
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Be Earth Now – Rainer Maria Rilke recited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
Earlier this year, the remarkable eco-philosopher Joanna Macy passed away at age ninety-six. Among her many gifts, she was a seminal translator of the great twentieth-century poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In our final episode of the year, we return to a selection of translations of Rilke from The Book...
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Alive in the Skin of a River’s Flow – Susan Murphy Roshi
In this week’s story, Australian writer and Zen roshi Susan Murphy explores how haiku’s reflections of the seasons are being disrupted by the climate crisis. How will this poetic form bear witness to the ferocity of change reshaping the seasons? Woven with verses from Bashō, Buson, Issa, and…
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The Substrate of Mystery: Mycelial Networks, Mutualism, and Symbiosis – A Conversation with Merlin Sheldrake
Fungi are veteran survivors of ecological disruption, and they demonstrate a radically different approach to crisis and decision-making than we do. While we tend to work with binaries and control when navigating uncertainty, mycelium works from a place of relationality. In this conversation,...
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Practical Reverence – A Conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer
This Thanksgiving holiday, we return to a conversation with Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, where she talks about her new book The Serviceberry, which emerged from an essay she wrote for us about the potential of a gift economy to recognize the sacred nature of the Earth. Robin…
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Seasons: A Conversation at the Tate Modern – with Melanie Challenger, Sam Lee, Dara McAnulty, Kerri ní Dochartaigh and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
In November, we celebrated the launch of our latest print edition, Seasons, at the Tate Modern in London. Recorded live at the event, this conversation featuring four Volume 6 contributors, delves into each of their stories and the themes of requiem, invitation, and celebration at the heart of...
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Earth as Koan, Earth as Self – A Conversation with Susan Murphy Roshi
In this conversation from our archive, Australian writer and Zen roshi Susan Murphy immerses us in the ancient tradition of koan and the power of the “not-knowing mind” to open a treasury of resources for meeting the climate crisis. Sharing several koans from Zen masters that push at the…
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On Time, Mystery, and Kinship – A Conversation with Jane Hirshfield
We return to one of our most in-depth interviews this week: a conversation with poet Jane Hirshfield, who has contributed a new poem to our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons. Reciting several poems from her prolific body of work, including Time Thinks of Time, she speaks about how her Zen...
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Strange New World - Roy Scranton
Probing the flatness of his Midwestern landscape, Roy Scranton challenges us to peer beyond what meets the eye to engage more thoughtfully with a place’s ecological, geological, and cosmological dimensions. What first appears to him as farmland, highways, and worn industrial sprawl in his new…
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Offering Our Attention with Humility – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
In this final talk of a three-part series, Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks about two essential elements needed if we are to tend to a relationship of reverence with the Earth: humility and offering. To ground ourselves in respect for the power of the Earth,...
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A Story of Requiem, Invitation, and Celebration – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
We are in need of stories that can help us navigate the complexity of our moment: both the unfolding ecological catastrophe and the love we feel for our burning world. This second talk in a series given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at our Song of the Seasons...
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Unfurling the Spiral – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
As an introduction to the themes within our latest print volume, Seasons, we’re sharing a series of talks over the next few weeks given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at our Song of the Seasons retreat on Whidbey Island. This first talk explores the cyclical...
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Thin White Line – Maya Pace
After the destructive fires of 2020, writer and facilitator Maya Pace awakens to how California’s essential dry, scorched nature has been repressed to realize a vision of economic and social prosperity across the state. Searching for what it means to love a place that is harsh, uncomfortable, or...
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Making the Invisible Visible – A Conversation with Ersin Han Ersin
A companion to our Breathing with the Forest feature, this conversation from our 2023 Shifting Landscapes exhibition with Marshmallow Laser Feast director Ersin Han Ersin explores the importance of imagination in making visible the often invisible threads that bind us together with the living...
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Museum of Color – Stephanie Krzywonos
Nonfiction writer Stephanie Krzywonos opens a door into the histories of our most iconic and desired pigments, from ochre to bone black, lapis lazuli to mummy brown. In our earliest attempts to recreate the magnificent colors of Earth for our art, garments, make-up, and more, we mixed and...
About this show
Emergence Magazine is an award-winning magazine exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture and spirituality. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, author-narrated essays, fiction, multipart series, and more. We feature new podcast episodes biweekly on Tuesdays.
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Emergence Magazine