Emergence Magazine Podcast

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 alchemized matter drawn from the flesh of the Earth Herself. Stephanie follows a spectrum of colors from these origins, through the entangled webs of colonialism, capitalism, and the more-than-human world, to their synthetic replication and mass production, inviting us to see how our colors hold stories of both lightness and darkness.  Read the essay. Artwork by Studio Airport. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if we had only decades left before the final harvest capable of feeding the world? Accustomed to Earth’s abundance year after year, can we imagine an end to something so eternal? In thirty short passages, from pruning dandelions with her four-year-old to grappling with the mathematical theory of infinity, art historian and writer Annabel Howard moves through a mind-warping process of fathoming a world where the cycles that have sustained us since the beginning of time cease. Following her fascination with the apocalyptic imagery in Botticelli’s Mystical Nativity, she contemplates how imagining the end of the infinite is not radical for our time, but rather an enduring way of giving shape to inconceivable realities. Like all of us, she reaches for certitude amid the fear of a world aflame, only to glimpse the paradox of apocalypse: that in ending there lies beginning.  Read the essay. Image © Carolyn Drake / Magnum Photos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In honor of the recent passing of the eco-philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and dear friend Joanna Macy, we return to our interview with her from 2018. In this conversation, she traces the ways a life-long heart connection with the living world cultivated a resounding ecological awareness within her work and spirituality; and explores how we might return to an “ecological self” as a way to be of service amid the climate catastrophe. Joanna was also a seminal translator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, finding his contemplations on the entwinement of grief, beauty, and spiritual life deeply resonant. You can hear Joanna recite, alongside Anita Burrows, a selection of their translations in our audio story Be Earth Now.  Read the interview transcript. Photo by Adam Loften. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re living in a world that is perpetually bathed in artificial light. We repel the dark. Yet, we live in the midst of what is often referred to as “dark times.” How can gazing upon the night sky connect us to a greater sense of space, beauty, and possibility? Are we able to come into a relationship with something infinitely bigger than ourselves? How can we be present and engaged amid the realities of environmental crisis, inequality, and shifting political tides? Whether you live in the city or someplace where the outdoors is more accessible, this final episode in our summer of practice audio series invites you to immerse yourself in nightfall and welcome the night as a window into mystery and awe. Explore the online version of this practice. Illustrations by Aldo Jarillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to listen without judgement, allowing your ears to be present, open, and curious? Inspired by our virtual reality film Sanctuaries of Silence, which follows acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton as he documents the sounds of the Hoh Rain Forest in western Washington State, this practice invites you to discover how a new experience of sound and silence can profoundly impact your relationship to place. By taking in sounds with equal value and becoming aware of the presence and absence of noise, voices, and quiet, the simple act of listening can help us come to know a landscape through the senses, rooting us in the power of sound and silence. Explore the online version of this practice. Illustration by Aldo Jarillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Biologist David G. Haskell calls the practice of listening to other species the original “augmented reality.” In opening our minds to the language of the species around us, we can experience connection and meaning that far transcends anything offered by an electronic substitute. This week, we’re sharing the next instalment in our Summer of Practice podcast series with a practice David wrote for us that invites you to attune to the birdcall near your home; become aware of the ecological rhythms and connections around and within you; and step into a sense of belonging as the conversations of humans and birds intertwine. Explore the online version of this practice. Illustration by Aldo Jarillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We continue our summer of practice with a second series of audio practices throughout August. In this episode, you are encouraged to respond to the ways trees invite you—through bloom, shade, wonder, breath—into closer relationship. From the old-growth forests whose presence precedes our lifetimes to the rooted sentinels of our own backyards, trees are humans’ oldest and most constant companions. This practice calls you to bring a renewed quality of attention to the threads that bind you and trees together within a shared biosphere. Explore the online version of this practice. Illustration by Aldo Jarillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we bring you the final Time audio practice—the fourth in a series exploring how we can come to dwell within a kind of time that is in relationship with the Earth, rather than the clock. This invitation draws your attention to the Earth’s immense capacity for recording the passage of time. Imagine your way backwards through millennia and then forward into the far future, as your journey through your homeplace, attentive to the histories held within its topography, ecosystems, and human markings. Explore the online version of this practice or shop our practice booklet, A Practice in Time.  Illustration by Aldo Jarillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Ancient Greek mythology, the old and powerful god Chronos oversaw the linear progression of time. Kairos, the youthful, wing-footed god of opportunity, expressed the possibility within a given moment. This practice—the third in our summer audio series—orients you towards “kairos time”: openings in time in the wake of change; timing that moment itself dictates. Explore how your sense of time determines how you participate in the world, and how you might balance a reliance on structured time with an openness to the unpredictable.  Explore the online version of this practice or shop our practice booklet, A Practice in Time. Illustration by Aldo Jarillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This summer, we’re sharing a series of audio practices—each inviting you into an experience of Earth time. This episode orients you towards one of the simplest practices you can do to shift your sense of time: walking. Follow the metronomic rhythm of your feet—down a bustling street or through a secluded woodland—and learn how moving at your most natural pace allows you to form relationships with what surrounds you. Receptive to the present moment, open to a simultaneous experience of deep inwardness and profound outer attentiveness, and step into the expanse of the timeless.  Explore the online version of this practice or shop our practice booklet, A Practice in Time. Illustration by Aldo Jarillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens when we’re able to inhabit time—even if momentarily—in an entirely new way? And how could this shift the way we relate and engage with each other, with the presence of mystery, and of course, with the Earth? Over the summer we're featuring a special series of audio practices exploring Time. This first episode invites you to attune to how your body and those of nearby more-than-human beings are in conversation with your ecosystem via internal clocks. Creating time together with the Earth, you are attentive to the pulses within and around you, and time can become an experience of kinship. Explore the online version of this practice or shop our practice booklet, A Practice in Time. Illustration by Aldo Jarillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer visits the Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, where over the course of two centuries scientists will study how old-growth trees and their decomposition contribute to the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth. For the forest’s cedar trees, Robin says, death is merely a transition—a rearrangement of elements from one species to the next. What might this teach us about the nature of our own “afterlife?” Can this cyclical ecology be an experimental theology? This episode is the final in a series we are sharing in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature. Read the essay. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this third story we’re sharing in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature, ecosystem ecologist Liam Heneghan turns to a council of philosophers and physicists to help reconcile the human experience of growth with the reality of decay as he keeps vigil by his father’s bedside. He contemplates how closely life sits at the margins of death—one bleeding into the other—and wonders what can be learned from the everyday breakdown of leaves, milk, friendships, solar systems that might orient us to the nature of our own passage from life to death. As his father passes—elements dispersing into air and soil—Liam recognizes that all that flourishes must return to Earth; that in decay, something always endures.  Read the essay. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The second in a series of stories we’re sharing in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature, this narrated essay by Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta explores the ways we’ve long mistaken cerebral thinking for knowing, and in doing so, dulled a more vital intelligence. He argues that we are “overthinking and underfeeling” our existence, and reminds us that we have a second brain: the gut, which “governs terrestrial relations and is in constant communication with land and all our human and nonhuman kin.” Likening our intellect to lightning, Tyson shares how we must let it interact with the regenerative and relational “fire” of our bellies if we are to respond properly to the needs of land and cosmos.  Read the essay. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the next month we'll be sharing four stories in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature. In this first one, author Sophie Strand uses her imagination to feel herself as part of the more-than-human world—as river, hummingbird, and mycelial network. Opening herself up to a “supracellular” state, she practices letting her mind leak beyond the bounds of individual consciousness and through the threads of relation that she shares with her ecosystem to experience being not a siloed self, but a web of interconnectivity. What empathy might take root and grow, she asks, when we practice thinking like this—when we imagine our consciousness to extend far beyond the confines of our own bodies? Read the essay. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to search for transcendence in a world going completely out of balance? From our archive, this interview with acclaimed author David James Duncan explores his epic novel Sun House, which follows an eclectic collection of characters as they each seek Truth and meaning, together forming an unintentional community in rural Montana. Talking about the ways a heart can be transformed by deep experiences of mystical transcendence, David shares the impetus behind the novel: to impart an experiential model of contemplative inner life that could help us navigate our ecological unraveling. He also speaks about the mystics, from Zen master Dōgen to the thirteenth-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, and what futures might become possible if we open our consciousness to love and the Divine.  Read the transcript. Photo by Chris La Tray. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if we listened to the complex clicks of whales and could understand their meanings? What would we hear and how might we respond? More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, artist and technologist James Bridle, and author Rebecca Giggs come together in this conversation with Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee to explore the ethical, legal, and relational implications of a new project using AI machine learning to translate the speech of sperm whales. Contemplating the human-centric linking of language with intelligence, the moral complexities of collecting and using these translations, and what it might mean to have an ear for “whale-ish,” they discuss whether a shared language is even needed to find a depth of kinship with whales. Read the transcript.  Image: Mike Korostelev / Moment via Getty Images Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this conversation, acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane asks the ancient and urgent question: is a river alive? Understanding rivers to be presences, not resources, he immerses us in the ways they “irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs, and stories,” and how we might recognize this within our imagination and ethics. He speaks about his latest book, and traces his journeys down the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, the waterways of Chennai in India, and the Mutehekau Shipu in Nitassinan and how each brought him to experience these water bodies as willful, spirited, and sacred beings. Read the transcript.  Photo by William Waterworth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writer Nicholas Triolo walks the length of the Rio Côa in central Portugal with a book by Christian mystic Thomas Merton in his pack. For Merton, the living world shimmered with a divine feminine presence, meaning all within it was worthy of our love. Along the winding landscape of the Côa, damaged by agriculture and home to endangered animals, Nicholas witnesses the messy, subversive nature of “rewilding.” And with Merton as his companion on the journey, he begins to feel a wild, relational divinity in the land around him, and a devotion essential to rewilding place and self amid today’s crises of despair and destruction.  Read the essay. Photo by Ricardo Ferreira / Courtesy of Rewilding Portugal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Hunt traverses the spine of the Curonian Spit in the Baltic Sea, and learns how its sands—anchored by forest roots for millennia—began to move rapidly and swallow villages in the eighteenth century when woodlands and sacred groves were systematically clear-cut for timber. Though halted through engineering and reforestation, the dunes are now eroding under human footsteps, and spilling into the lagoon they border. As he witnesses how quickly landscapes are changed by our own hands, Nick asks if the challenge is not in reversing the damage we’ve done, but in remembering humility before the forces of the Earth. Read the essay. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices