Emergence Magazine Podcast

Joanna Macy, an author and eco-philosopher, reflects on her childhood experiences on a farm, her anti-nuclear activism, and her ongoing work with deep ecology. She discusses the importance of love, courage, and connection during the climate crisis. Macy also explores the transformative power of despair and shares the impact of a book and a poem on her spiritual path.

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Speaker at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, explores the need for inner transformation, shifting perspectives, and embracing the Earth as our mother. He discusses the importance of creating sacred spaces and nurturing future generations, emphasizing love and connection with the dying, unraveling, and emerging world.

In this conversation, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Salopek, who is a decade into a remarkable journey retracing, on foot, the migration pathway taken by the first humans out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Speaking to us from the Liaoning province in northeastern China, Paul shares how moving at three miles per hour has deepened his personal relationship to time. As he becomes attuned to what he terms "sacramental time," the boundaries between the physical and metaphysical begin to blur into an expansive experience of timelessness.Read the transcript.Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week.Photo by Paul Salopek, National Geophraphic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Martin Shaw, a mythologist, takes us on a deep encounter with a living myth of a wild daughter falling in love with a bear. The podcast explores the power of myth, our connection to the wild, and the woman's journey filled with helpful gifts and challenges.

In our final podcast of the year, a special selection of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry offers nourishment for heart and spirit. Twenty-five years ago, Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy collaborated with award-winning poet Anita Burrows to translate Rilke’s seminal collection of poetry, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, which explores the nature of God through divinely received prayers. In this reading, excerpted from the album Be Earth Now, produced by Fletcher Tucker at Gnome Life Records, Joanna and Anita recite some of these poems, reminding us of the ever-urgent call to love the world into being.Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week.Cover artwork by Claire Collette. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Witnessing the cry of the Earth, in its myriad permutations, can evoke real responses of grief and deep love for the planet. As we begin to acknowledge the wounds we’ve inflicted upon our nonhuman kin, how can tender connections with a harmed Earth foster spaces of healing? In this week’s podcast, poet and author Camille T. Dungy reaches for the possibility of sanctuary amid pain and loss. Bearing witness to an encounter between a man and an injured elephant, her poem offers us the opportunity to step into a moment where past harm gives way to an expansive recognition of love.Read this poem.Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week.Cover artwork by Studio Airport. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this short story, Booker Prize–winning Nigerian author and poet Ben Okri envisions the tragedy and peace of a post-human world. Twenty thousand years into the future, an exploration of Earth uncovers the final notes and unfinished stories left by the last human beings in the twilight of their civilization. Reflecting on humanity’s genius for extraction and domination, this uncanny tale, narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, follows our trajectory into extinction and invites the question: When will we truly comprehend the future we have seeded?Read this story on our website.Find “Thylacine” and other “Short Stories of Apocalypse,” in our inaugural print fiction collection.Learn more about our current immersive exhibition in London. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES.Cover artwork by Studio Airport. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Bridle, a writer, artist, and technologist, questions our assumptions about intelligence and AI models. They advocate for embracing the unknowable and the unpredictable, shifting away from humancentric thinking. They discuss the importance of redefining intelligence and recognizing different forms in diverse creatures. The podcast explores solidarity with the non-human world, agency in coping with climate grief, and the upcoming immersive exhibition in London.

In one of our favorite stories, “Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System,” Potawatomi mother, scientist, and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer takes us through the nine-thousand-year existence of maize, reflecting on the ancient circle of reciprocity that links humans and corn and what has been severed in this once deeply sacred relationship. With an eye to the unsustainable industrial practices—GMOs, monoculture, use of toxic fertilizers—that continue to dominate the landscape of agriculture, Robin invites us to reconnect with the age-old teachings and kinships, held within plants, that are waiting to be remembered.Explore this feature.Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this narrated essay, Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s experiences of pregnancy and motherhood bring her into an emerging realization of her own mammalhood. When she encounters her animal self, deeply embedded in the ecosystems around her, it transforms everything: her sense of home and safety; what it means to feel, to act, to care through the ancient, feral knowledge of instinct. Listening for teachings from the Earth, Kerri feels her way through the anguish and tenderness of raising a child in a burning and breaking—and beautiful—world.Read this essay.Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices