Emergence Magazine Podcast

In this narrated essay, Cal Flyn observes new species of butterflies arriving in Scotland's Orkney Islands. As plants and animals migrate northwards on an unprecedented scale, she faces the haunting knowledge that some voices are rising as others fade away. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We invited Oscar-nominated composer Volker Bertelmann, also known as Hauschka, to create a unique companion to the stories in our third volume, Living with the Unknown. The resulting four-part score is a cinematic and introspective experience, and a compelling counterpart for the journey into the unknown. When we first spoke to Volker about the issue’s themes—Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures—he said he felt like they were describing a life circle and the course of creativity. Deep crises and collapses, he said, are necessary steps in evolution. His score evokes this circle, taking the listener through the questions about transformation that we’re exploring in this issue—and more broadly as a magazine. This week, we’re excited to share the soundtrack of Living with the Unknown. Sit back and enjoy this contemplative sonic experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amid the cacophony of a cicada emergence, our final narrated essay on the theme of Initiation follows a movement into new rhythms and patterns of becoming. While immersed in a unified chorus of insect voices, playwright and director Anisa George reflects on her departure from the Bahá’í faith and its promise of a new civilization, choosing instead to embark on her own path. Sounds provided by David Rothenberg.Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter One: Initiation”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, as our journey into Initiation continues, Sufi teacher and author Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee invites us to cross a threshold. Witnessing how humanity is tearing apart the web of life, he calls us to return our awareness to a fully animate world and to the deep ecology of consciousness we once held.Emergence Magazine, Vol 3: Living with the Unknown explores what living in an apocalyptic reality looks like through four themes: Initiation, Ashes, Roots, and Futures. Every two months we’ll release a new chapter online. Experience “Chapter One: Initiation.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview from our archive, Buddhist eco-philosopher and author Joanna Macy discusses her life and work. From her anti-nuclear activism in the late 1960s to her work with deep ecology, Joanna expresses the need to live within an ethic of care for the earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay from our archive, poet and essayist Lia Purpura considers the processes which transform bodies from one state to another and the beginnings that emerge from endings. When she encounters the decomposing body of a deer, she witnesses the forces of restoration at play and wonders what constitutes stories of “rightness.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Initiation, chapter one of Living with the Unknown, begins where all inquiries into the unknown begin: with myth. In this narrated essay, Martin Shaw provides a mythological framework for forging new paths, calling upon different intelligences, and committing acts of sacred transgression as we walk our questions into a troubled future. Over the coming months, we’ll continue to release narrated stories from Emergence, Volume 3, as we ask: What does living in an unfolding apocalyptic reality look like? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam Lee is a Mercury Prize–nominated folk singer, a song collector, and the author of The Nightingale: Notes on a Songbird. We spoke with Sam last year in the midst of England’s nightingale season about the transformative experience of creating songs in collaboration with a songbird. As part of a new documentary series that will be released next year, we're heading to the UK to experience Sam singing with the nightingales firsthand. In the meantime, we are revisiting this special conversation: one filled with song, as well as the stories of ancestors that are passed through folk music and the space for communion that is opened with silence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Long, long ago—before there were trees, before there were flowers, before life existed outside of the churning oceans—mosses bravely ventured onto dry land. In this special Earth Week episode Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, takes a long view of life on Earth, exploring how mosses—ancient beings who transformed the world—can teach us strategies for persisting amid a changing climate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In honor of Earth Week we’re revisiting our conversation from last year with Dr. Suzanne Simard, the renowned scientist whose groundbreaking research, widely known as “the wood-wide web,” demonstrated how trees communicate and exchange resources through networks of mycorrhizal fungi within the soil. In this interview, Suzanne speaks about the urgent implications of our evolving understanding of the interdependent nature of forests for healing the rift between ourselves and the living world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At her home in Siliguri, India, writer and poet Sumana Roy collects the trunks, roots, and branches of fallen trees and affectionately places them in the rooms of her house—admiring their life even in death. In this narrated essay, Sumana and her nephew debate whether the dead trunks can be revived by the element of water and reflect on the continuance of all that has vanished from our sight.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, Boyce Upholt travels to the US-Mexico border, where the O’odham peoples have long revered the saguaro cactus as a being with personhood—a belief that is congruous with the recent rights-of-nature movement. As legal protections for the cactus come up against the push to build a wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Park, Boyce meets with elders from the Tohono O’odham Nation who are acting on behalf of the rooted beings of the desert. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, Jori ventures out from her home in Dakar, Senegal, drawn to the wisdom and resiliency of Africa’s baobab trees: ancient arks of biodiversity that have migrated across the landscape, enduring for millennia. As many of the oldest trees have died and younger ones struggle to survive, Jori bears witness to these elders in a rapidly changing world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay for our ongoing series on migration, Anna Badkhen asks: When does a journey begin? As she encounters people traveling north of the Ethiopian capital who are looking for a means of escape, she considers failed migrations when the forces of climate catastrophe and colonial greed combine to trap the world’s most vulnerable populations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, environmental philosopher Melanie Challenger examines the belief in human exceptionalism that has devastated life on this planet, and wonders if our desire to outrun death is hindering our capacity to love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narration of his essay, birder and naturalist J. Drew Lanham imagines an exchange of letters between Henry David Thoreau and John James Audubon, two pillars of conservation: one who extended his love of nature to care for a fellow human, and one who did not. Through this discourse, Drew asks: In the ongoing response to racism, how might reckoning with history help us to widen our field of view and weave better futures?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This sonic journey written and narrated by David G. Haskell brings us to the beginning of sound and song on planet Earth. The experience is made entirely of tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound. Spoken words combined with terrestrial sounds invite our senses and imaginations to go outward into an experience of the living Earth and its history. How did the vast and varied chorus of modern sounds—from forest to oceans to human music—emerge from life’s community? When did the living Earth first start to sing? We invite you on a journey into deep time and deep sound that will open your ears and your imagination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narration of her essay, writer and poet Makshya Tolbert wades into the liminal, haunted space that exists between water and Black memory. As she navigates Black lineages of thinking and practice, she comes to the meeting place of past and present, life and death, slavery and freedom, and embarks on her own return to water.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In honor of the passing of Buddhist monk and Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, we republished his Ten Love Letters to the Earth, a series of meditations that engage us in intimate conversation with the living world. Here, Emergence Executive Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee reads all ten letters for our podcast. Composed as a living dialogue, they are even more potent when recited. We invite you to read them aloud yourself, joining your voice to Thich Nhat Hanh's call to fall in love with the Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spanish missions, boarding schools, and ranching empires in California drove many Coast Miwok people from their ancestral land, targeting the erasure of their history and identity.This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their home and one woman’s determination to bring the living history of her family back to the land. In Episode Three, Theresa Harlan continues her grassroots efforts to protect the last standing Coast Miwok structures on Tomales Bay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices