Emergence Magazine Podcast

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 permutations of wild, intricate beauty, but participants in an endless unfolding of the Mystery. In the...

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 of pickling, aging, and brewing back into our kitchens as a way to tune in to what's growing near us thr...

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 Vaughan-Lee, they explore how restoring embodied practices of ecological reverence can help us cultivate a s...

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 with words, silence, and the love within our hearts, these practices can be easily integrated into eve...

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 awareness of cycles rooted in place, tread the same path over a full cycle of seasons, and regularly offer...

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 and heart practices from the last two weeks, this episode from our Remembering Earth summer practice ser...

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 awareness of breath and love as you walk. One doesn’t need to travel across vast lands to tune in to the a...

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 Remembering Earth practice series, this episode offers three practices that immerse you in the presence of...

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 often seen as a technology that bridges spirit and matter, helping us move beyond the mind into a more po...

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 moment of ecological and cultural crisis serves as a crucible for collective transformation. Read “Ch...

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 to the freckling of Humboldt squid. She urges us to act less as intermediaries and more as deep listener...

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, sandstone, jasper—these field notes give a glimpse of the cycles that continually play out amid apparent stillne...

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 of attending to “the Glorians”—visitations that fuse our attention with the wild mystery around us—she...

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 words it relies on no longer reflect our ecological reality. The second story is an excerpt from the book...

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 one's being—rather than a backdrop of abstract phenomena—shows us how when the body is in relation wit...

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 age-old labor of writing has always been a profoundly embodied act, and considers how all our creation...

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 made not just in the forest, but in conscious collaboration with it. This week, we return to a conversat...

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 and Ch’an Buddhist philosophies, David reveals how offering attention to the beauty of simple moments, li...

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 Traditional Ecological Knowledge to reshape our forest harvesting methods in ways that protect the integrit...

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 book, this audio version is meant to be listened to outside, amid the Earth's cycles of birth, growth, de...

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 human hands. Tracing how these heralds of spring have adapted to new climate conditions and new neighb...

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 our relationality with all living things? Tracing how a childhood in Derry in the northwest of Ireland t...

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 pollen-dusted black bees, and the feeling of joy tinged with grief as familiar seasonal moments return each y...

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 wildfire haze that test his love of the summer, Jake asks how such extremes will reshape our intimate a...

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 follows Merton’s 1968 pilgrimage to the American West as he travels to Redwoods Monastery and Christ in the...