Emergence Magazine Podcast

A Glorian Is a Moment of Grace — A Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams 01.06.2026 1h 6min

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 explores how they can help our hearts expand to hold the paradoxes of our moment. Read the transcript. Photo by Barb Kinney

Five Hundred Words and Thirty-Two Words for Field – Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Manchán Magan 26.05.2026 39min

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 Thirty-Two Words for Field, by the late Manchán Magan, that invites us into landscapes known intimately through the Irish language . Narrated by Manchán’s brother, Ruán, this excerpt is layered with folklore, proverbs, and cultural memory.Read Marie Mutsuki Mockett.Read Manchán Magan.Credit: Matt Dutile / Gallery Stock

The Thread of Belonging - Dara McAnulty 19.05.2026 20min

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 with the land, our sense of self can soften back into belonging with Earth. Read the essay. Credit: David Avazzadeh / Connected Archives

In Defense of Generation(s) – Stephanie Krzywonos 12.05.2026 42min

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 creations, whether impressed in clay or typed on a computer, are microcosms of Earth’s own generativity. As AI increasingly does work for us, she wonders if we are closing ourselves off from the intelligence of the Earth. Read the essay. Illustration by Aldo Jarillo.

Song of the Cedars – A Conversation with Giuliana Furci, Robert Macfarlane, César Rodríguez-Garavito, and Cosmo Sheldrake 05.05.2026 52min

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 conversation between them that explores their time in the forest and their ongoing efforts to secure legal recognition for its role in creating the song. Interspersed with the track’s polyphony—toucan calls, cicada strings, and leaf chatter woven with human voices—this conversation invites you to listen to what true creative reciprocity with the Earth can sound like.Read the transcript.Photo by Robert Macfarlane.

An Ethics of Wild Mind – A Conversation with David Hinton 28.04.2026 41min

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, like birdsong and blossom-fall, can bring us into a particular quality of awareness; and how the cycles of absence and presence in the seasons are mirrored by the cycles of form and emptiness in our own inner worlds.Read the transcript.Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.Photo by Phil Dera

The Scaffolding of Life: Cyclical Structures of a Forest — A Conversation with Suzanne Simard 21.04.2026 58min

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 integrity of both their ecosystems and our climate futures. As she shares her team’s landmark findings on what Mother Trees are telling us about generational resilience, Suzanne challenges us to begin working with the intelligence of the forest. Read the transcript. Photo by Bill Heath

Song of the Seasons: A Meditation on Cycles, Story, and Humility – by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee 14.04.2026 56min

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, decay, and death, accompanying you as you seek a deeper engagement with the seasons.Discover the print edition of Song of the Seasons.Artwork by Maurits Wouters.

Wildflower Beauty and the Search for Home – by David George Haskell 07.04.2026 52min

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 neighbors, he invites us to seek the stories of the flowers where we live to ground ourselves in the shifting realities shaping us too.Read the essay. Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.Hear more from David on the seasons and wildflowers in his conversation with Dara McAnulty and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.Image caption: Aquilegia coerulea

Making Light: An Invitation… – by Kerri ní Dochartaigh 31.03.2026 35min

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 taught her to tend the delicate, often invisible threads that bind us to each other, she brings us into the Celtic celebration of Bealtaine, which marks the transition towards the brightness of summer, to reveal how Earth’s cycles of light and dark are a dance of which we are a part.Read the essay. Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.Photo by Al Brydon and J.M Golding

A Thousand Ways to Live Within the Seasons — A Conversation with David G. Haskell, Dara McAnulty, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee 24.03.2026 1h 5min

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 year altered, David and Dara invite us to open our eyes, ears, and hearts to the celebration that lives within the seasons. Read the transcript. Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Summer Light: A Failed Essay in Four Parts – Jake Skeets 17.03.2026 33min

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 and ancestral relationship with the seasons.Read the essay. Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.Image Credit: Evelyn Dragan / Connected Archives

On the Road with Thomas Merton – Fred Bahnson 10.03.2026 1h 7min

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 Desert Monastery. Guided by Merton’s contemplation and seeking the same solitude, Fred discovers anew the ways God runs through both land and heart.Read the essay.Watch the companion film by Jeremy Seifert.Photo by Thomas Merton.

The Springing Time – Melanie Challenger 03.03.2026 33min

Can we learn from more-than-human beings how to bring our bodies into a more direct conversation with the seasons? In this week’s story, bioethics and history researcher Melanie Challenger explores how our culture insulates us from experiencing seasonal signals in the natural world, ultimately impeding our ability to respond to ecological change. Examining how animals and plants translate important shifts in the land into meaningful activity, Melanie reflects on what it would take for humans to reawaken the same attunement to the changes, great and small, unfolding around us.Read the essay.Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.Photo credit: Credit: Alex Strohl / Verb Photo

Echoic Memory – CMarie Fuhrman 24.02.2026 20min

This week, author and poet CMarie Fuhrman listens to the forest speak its old stories through the roll of thunder, the river emptied of salmon, and the howl of wolves in Idaho’s remote Frank Church Wilderness. In these sounds and silences, she remembers the people and knowledge that colonial history has tried to erase. Recognizing herself as a “person of ground,” she contemplates the past as something that we can call forth into the present, and memory as moving in the opposite direction of prayer—down into the Earth.Read the story.Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.Photo by Luca Werner

A Hollow Bone – Terry Tempest Williams 17.02.2026 22min

In a season of loss, how does absence offer a greater understanding of presence? This week, Terry Tempest Williams brings us into her love affair with Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a place that nourishes twelve million migrating birds, bison herds, and deep-rooted human communities, and which is now in retreat. Contemplating how we might be in service to this dying lake, Terry summons us to be present with the losses in the landscape.Read the story.Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.Photo by Christina Seely

Tortoise Station – Lydia Millet 10.02.2026 34min

Depicting a distant age in which river guardians, mothmen, and condor trackers strive to protect a dying world, novelist Lydia Millet asks whether we can navigate species loss not through visions of saviors, but through patient devotion to what might yet emerge through care. Amid extreme temperatures and invasive insects, this short story follows a team of caretakers who track, feed, and hatch the clutches of “the old ones”—ancient desert tortoises nearing extinction.Read the story.Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.Credit: Daniel Farò / Connected Archives

Memory of Winter – Zoë Schlanger 03.02.2026 28min

For plants, the moment of spring emergence is the gamble of their lives, says journalist Zoë Schlanger. They rely on a convergence of genetic instructions from within and environmental cues from without to know when it is time to bring new life into the world. But what happens when seasonal markers and a plant’s molecular memory, shaped by generations of winters, no longer agree? Seeing this increasing tension between timelines reflected in her own journey toward parenthood, Zoë asks how we can steward a world where the fragile conversations between biological clocks are being rewritten.Read the essay.Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.Photo by Sam Laughlin.

Theia – Brian Isett 27.01.2026 22min

In this week’s story, biologist Brian Isett ponders the age-old question his young daughter will inevitably ask — Where did the Moon come from? — and uncovers how the Earth got Her seasonal song. He introduces us to Theia, the proto-planet that came crashing into the surface of our infant planet four and a half billion years ago, tilting the Earth on Her axis and birthing the Moon. This meeting ultimately shaped the passing of time, the movement of tides, and the cycle of the seasons as we have known them. With the seasons now changing in response to our neglect of the Earth, Theia offers a reminder that these rhythms have always evolved through relationship. Read the essay. Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons. Image: Earth’s reflection on the Moon / NASA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Heart of Requiem – A Conversation with Susan Murphy Roshi, Terry Tempest Williams, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee 20.01.2026 1h 1min

Sharing a depth of attention for what stands to be lost in our relationship with the seasons, Volume 6 contributors Terry Tempest Williams and Susan Murphy Roshi come together to explore the theme of requiem in this first conversation of a companion series to Seasons. Drawing on their respective essays, “A Hollow Bone” and “Alive In the Skin of a River’s Flow,” Terry and Susan contemplate what becomes present amid absence, a love for the burning world, and ways we can move with flock consciousness through this time of ecological uncertainty. Read the transcript. Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices