Claim OwnershipEmergence Magazine Podcast
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© Emergence Magazine 2022
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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 weekly on Tuesdays.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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1We 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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English novelist Daisy Hildyard envisions the deep time evolution of the coastline of Scarborough, North Yorkshire: from a prehistoric meteor strike, to a 19th-century seaside aquarium devoid of fish, a present-day spate of dead tides, and a future where part of the human population has evolved into a hybrid marine species, drawn back to the cradle of the sea to care for its degraded waters. Vividly narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, and created as part of Wild Eye—an art and nature trail in Yorkshire that raises awareness about coastal erosion in the face of climate change—this short story traces the forever-shifting tides of our relationship with the sea.
Read the story.
Illustration by Muhammad Fatchurofi.
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In celebration of Earth Day, this episode invites you to offer your ears to the polyphony of sounds and silences that give the planet Her voice with two of our most cherished audio stories. “When the Earth Started to Sing,” by biologist David G. Haskell, combines human speech with more-than-human voices to immerse your senses in the connective power of sound across deep time. “Sanctuaries of Silence,” an adaptation of our virtual reality experience featuring acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, brings you to the Hoh Rain Forest—one of the quietest places in North America—and guides you through the sounds that emerge in the absence of noise.
Illustration by Daniel Liévano.
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As humans, we long for stability, yet the Earth tells us in many languages—erosion, ice melt, the seasons—that all is fleeting in an endless cycle of creation and destruction. Grappling with her fear of change caused by wildfires in Montana and the long-overdue Cascadia earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, Erica Berry confronts how the colonial erasure of Indigenous stories of place and her own limited sense of time have blinded her to the Earth’s dramatic flux. As she learns that impermanence doesn’t always signal loss, but rather the transformation of form, she finds a way to hold the fluctuation of the lands she loves.
Read the essay.
Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.
Photo by Zeb Andrews.
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In the tradition of telling the bees, beekeepers relay the news of a death in the family to each of their hives, oftentimes draping them in black mourning cloth. As bee colonies in the US perish in record numbers, Emily Polk wonders if bees not only witness human grief, but also feel loss themselves. Meeting with a famous Yemeni beekeeper in downtown Oakland, California, and scientists from around the world studying bee behavior and cognition, she learns of the enduring generosity and spirit of survival of these tiny creatures, and glimpses the greater circles of loss that connect us with the more-than-human world.
Read the essay.
Photo: Wray Sinclair / Gallery Stock
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On a field trip to Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador in 2022, 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. Rich with field recordings of the ecosystem and the track’s entwined human and more-than-human melodies, this conversation between the foursome explores their ongoing effort to gain legal recognition of Los Cedros as co-creator of the song, which if successful, will be a world first.
Read the transcript.
Photo by Robert Macfarlane.
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truly inspiring episode, enjoyed it greatly!
Here