Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show and executive editor of Emergence Magazine, located on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County. Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. It's my guess that each and every one of us has, in the last couple of years, witnessed something out of the ordinary in the rhythms and cycles that usually govern our landscapes. Whether it is the yellow bulbs of daffodils pushing their heads through the soil before winter has begun to give way to spring, migrating swifts arriving ahead of schedule, or the berries that fill the bellies of birds, squirrels, and humans, ripening later one summer and early the next. In this essay, author David Ferrier helps place these experiences into a bigger picture of transformation. All over the globe, wild clocks, the biological and ecological rhythms that we and other living beings use to coordinate our lives with the greater cycles of the earth are colliding, falling out of sync with the sense of time we've lived by for millennia. From the future library in Norway, to the migration of semi-reindeer herds, and oyster colonies in Scotland's Firth of Forth, David considers the different ways time is made between people, more than human beings and place, and wonders if the disordering of our wild clocks offers an opportunity to understand anew how time could deepen our ties with the living world.

In every living thing there ticks a clock. Lodged in all is a set metronome, wrote W.H. Auden. When May comes round, birds still in the egg click to each other, hatch, and October's nip is the signal for trees to release their leaves. Once these rhythms comforted and consoled, orchestrating innumerable ecological relationships and offering glimpses of the greater wheels within which our small lives turn.