Emergence Magazine Podcast

In this in-depth interview, writer Robert Macfarlane takes listeners on a journey through language and landscape, exploring how a precision of utterance and a grammar of reciprocity can summon wonder in our encounters with place. Robert is the author of “The Old Ways,” “The Wild Places,” “Mountains of the Mind,” “Landmarks,” and “Underland.”

Paul Kingsnorth faces his suspicion that modern written language is in fact a tool of ecocide. Paul is the author of the novels “The Wake” and “Beast,” the essay collection “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” and the poetry collection “Songs from the Blue River.” His latest book is “Savage Gods: A Crisis of Words.”

Elizabeth Rush reflects on climate change as a transformational force on our landscapes and the words we might use to grasp this shifting reality. Her book “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore” was recently nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for its rigorous reporting on America’s vulnerability to rising seas. This narrated essay is an account of the days she spent driving through the Pacific Northwest while on a tour for the book—a time of wildfires, loss, and possible futures.

David Haskell enters the intricate and generative soundscape of the world of birds, inviting us to join in a practice of cross-species listening as a bridge to kinship. David is the author of “The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors” and “The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature.”

In an effort to seek out a language beyond the human, Charles Foster travels to the Isle of Skye to listen to the intricate vocalizations of the eight remaining Scottish killer whales. Charles is the author of more than twenty books, including “Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide” and “Wired for God: The Biology of Spiritual Experience.”

Rejecting the refrain “there are no words,” author and poet Camille T. Dungy reaches for a language that can encompass the experience of loneliness, erasure, and loss. Camille is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently “Trophic Cascade,” and a collection of personal essays, “Guidebook to Relative Strangers.” She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019.

As a companion to Kimberly Ruffin's essay “Bodies of Evidence” from our Faith issue, she created this guided practice offering ways to connect to the living world through a walk in the forest. For Kimberly, faith is a continuous exchange of belonging, an experience that’s palpable among trees. In this practice, as with any experience in nature use common sense, trust your intuition, and tell somewhere where you’re going.

For Chickasaw novelist and poet, Linda Hogan, hope lives where faith has fallen away. During an encounter with caged elephants, she experiences a wave of profound and startling love in the presence of beings so very different from—and so very like—ourselves. In her essay “Ancient Root,” Linda reflects on how these beings embody a terrestrial intelligence akin to our own.

In this narrated essay, Aylie Baker reflects on her experiences sailing by canoe under Micronesian Master Navigator Sesario Sewralur and shows how we can draw on an innate ability to orient ourselves in a shifting world. Born in Maine, Aylie is committed to supporting the healing of watershed communities. View this story on our website: www.emergencemagazine.org/story/wave-patterns

In an age when the fate of the world is frightfully unknown, George Prochnik, author of “In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise,” makes a case for uncertainty as a form of faith and hope. If we unravel our desire for the all-knowing, he says, we can enter into a sanctuary of mystery, in which “I do not know” becomes a statement of hope.

In this in-depth interview, Reverend angel Kyodo williams reflects on our widespread crisis of story, the failure of institutional religions to offer a new way forward, and her philosophy of Radical Dharma—a path to individual and collective liberation. A Sensei in the Japanese Zen tradition, angel is author of “Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace” and coauthor of “Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation.”

In this in-depth interview, Bill Porter, famously known as the translator Red Pine, reflects on his encounters with Chinese hermits and his long history with the great Taoist and Buddhist poets of China.

As Kimberly Ruffin revisits her upbringing and spiritual heritage, she compiles the bodies of evidence that have invigorated her spirit. A certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and a new member of a church, Kimberly explores where “spirit power” can be found, both within a church community and in the places where faith rises up within the land.

In this narrated essay, writer and poet Lia Purpura delves into the horrified wonder and holiness of death, exploring burial practices that are intended to nourish the earth, as it has nourished us.

Struggling to explain her belief in God to her atheist husband, award-winning Palestinian American poet Hala Alyan reflects on her Muslim faith as inextricably linked to her family, to Palestine, and to histories of erasure.