Emergence Magazine Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Memory, Praise, and Spirit – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee Sep 03, 2024

Show notes

This talk was a keynote given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee during a conference on spiritual ecology and peace building at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in July. It explores how spiritual ecology is fundamentally a memory of living in kinship with the Earth that must be reawakened if we are to embody a spiritual connection with the living world. Turning to praise and prayer, and the many forms they take, as ways to return to this sacred relationship, Emmanuel calls us to sweep the dust of our forgetfulness and hold the Earth in our hearts with love

Read the transcript.

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Giantstone – Andri Snær Magnason Aug 27, 2024

Show notes

This short story, written by Andri Snær Magnason for our third print edition, follows an architect in Reykjavík grappling with the growing discord between his creativity and a capitalist reality. Laying bare the ways narratives of control and human supremacy can manifest in the physical objects we make, “Giantstone” asks us to consider what new stories could begin to shape our inner and outer worlds. Will we remain stuck in our humancentric philosophies, or will our art come to reflect a way of life that keeps and cares for the Earth?

Read the short story.

Watch the film The Last Ice Age, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the third in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

Illustration by Juan Bernabeu.

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On Time and Water – A Conversation with Andri Snær Magnason Aug 20, 2024

Show notes

The warming of the planet is ushering in changes on a mythological scale. Oceans heat up, ice shelves melt, great floods swallow landscapes, ancient forests are reduced to ash. In this interview from our archive, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason speaks about how such incomprehensible changes are accelerating geological timescales. Instead of playing out over millennia, vast transformations of the Earth are now happening in the span of a lifetime, and in rapid succession. An accompaniment to The Last Ice Age—the third film in our Shifting Landscapes film series—this conversation with Andri explores how we can shift our sense of time to comprehend an uncertain future with greater clarity. Drawing on poetry, memories, stories from his grandparents, and language that infuses meaning into the data-led narrative of the climate crisis, Andri turns to the power of mythology to help us comprehend both the loss and possibility of our moment.

Read the transcript.

Watch the film The Last Ice Age, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the third in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

Photo by Gassi Olafsson.

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ChatGPT: A Partner in Unknowing – Dana Karout Aug 06, 2024

Show notes

ChatGPT has divided opinion on how artificial intelligence might shape our future: Is it a harbinger of our demise? Or a friend, arrived just in time to guide us through our collective unraveling? As we entangle ourselves with this technology, are there ways we can use it to transform our intelligence, rather than simply replicating it?

In this week’s essay, writer and adaptive leadership trainer Dana Karout pokes fun at the ways ChatGPT mirrors our own limited ways of thinking. Drawing on her work helping communities navigate conflict and complexity, she pushes us to resist regurgitating what we already know in situations that demand new ways of being. As we try to address the existential challenges mounting around the world—ecological, social, spiritual—could ChatGPT’s empty spiels help us let go of our certainties? What true creativity, what real responses to our moment of crisis, might emerge from our unknowing?

Read the essay.

Illustration by Vartika Sharma.

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Born was the Mountain – Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder Jul 23, 2024

Show notes

Last week we released Aloha ‘Āina, the second film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary film series, which tells the story of how acclaimed Native Hawaiian poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio brought her poetry and love of the land to the forefront of the movement to protect the sacred Mauna Kea from the construction of a thirty-meter telescope.

To complement the film, we’re returning to an investigative story we published several years ago when moves to begin construction first ignited protest at the foot of the mountain. Written by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, this story—rich with the voices and chants of Mauna Kea land protectors—traces the collision of values that continues to play out on the mountain, giving a depth of context to the promise of guardianship maintained by the Kanaka Maoli community.

Read the transcript.

Watch the film Aloha ‘Āina, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the first in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

Photo by Kapulei Flores.

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Sun House – A Conversation with David James Duncan Jul 02, 2024

Show notes

Although the ecological sphere has long declared the need for a shift in consciousness if we are to survive the myriad crises we’ve ignited, this conversation often lacks examples of what this change in consciousness might be like as a lived, embodied experience.

This week, author of the cult classics The Brothers K and The River Why, David James Duncan, joins the podcast to speak about his new epic novel, Sun House—a story following the journeys of an eclectic collection of characters, each seeking Truth and meaning, who come together to form an unintentional community in rural Montana. David talks about the impetus behind the novel to impart an experiential model of contemplative inner life that might help navigate a future of social, cultural, and ecological unraveling that looms large. Wide-ranging and tender, the conversation explores how the wisdom of the great mystics—from Zen master Dōgen to the thirteenth-century Christian theologian Meister Eckhart and the Beguines—can be relevant in uncovering responses to the crises we face.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Chris La Tray.

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The Nightingale's Song – A Conversation with Sam Lee Jun 18, 2024

Show notes

This month we released the first film in our new four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series exploring the role of art and the storyteller in our age of ecological crisis. The inspiration for The Nightingales Song, which spends time with British folk singer Sam Lee during nightingale season as he joins the bird in mutual song, grew from a special interview we held with Sam in 2021.

To accompany the film, we’re returning to this conversation with Sam, where he shares the story of how the call of the nightingale opened him to a kinship with the more-than-human. Reflecting on how this bird has served as a “wisdom keeper” and “unlocker” of hearts for generations of poets, musicians, and storytellers, he also speaks more about his process of leading audiences into this magical space of communion with the nightingale each spring.

Read the transcript.

Watch the film The Nightingale's Song, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the first in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series.

Photo by Dominick Tyler.

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Time: A Conversation at London’s Architectural Association – with Marko Milovanovic and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee Jun 04, 2024

Show notes

In this conversation, held in May at the Architectural Association in London, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and architect, artist, and journalist Marko Milovanovic talk about Time, our fifth annual print edition, and our exploration of the mystery that lies beyond our humancentric notions of Time. Ranging from the kinds of time that can bring us back into relationship with the living world, to the mystical Sufi poet Rumi, and the impulses shaping our print editions, this talk explores the vision behind Emergence to help reweave the worlds of ecology, culture, and spirituality, and once again understand the Earth is alive, animate, and sacred.

Read the transcript.

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Making the Invisible Visible – A Conversation with Marshmallow Laser Feast’s creative director Ersin Han Ersin May 21, 2024

Show notes

In this conversation from our Shifting Landscapes exhibition, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is joined by Marshmallow Laser Feast creative director Ersin Han Ersin, one of the artists behind the exhibition’s large-scale installation, Breathing with the Forest, which invites you into an experience of exchanging breath with a forest in the Colombian Amazon. Talking about the ways MLF’s projects bring together science and imagination to illuminate the hidden connections within the living world, Ersin speaks to the power of sensory engagement, wonder, and awe to broaden our perception of more-than-human experiences.

Explore our special online adaptation of Breathing with the Forest.

Read the transcript.

Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast and Sandra Ciampone.

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A Forest Walk – A Guided Practice by Kimberly Ruffin May 14, 2024

Show notes

When we step into a forest aware and listening to what surrounds us—remembering that the living world is just as aware of our presence—a relationship of reciprocity can take root. How might such a quality of attention change our ability to see, feel, and give ourselves to the landscapes around us? In this audio practice, writer and certified nature and forest therapy guide Kimberly Ruffin takes us on a sensory walk to meet the soil, sky, smells, and sounds of the forest. Encouraging us to “be a part of the music of a place,” this practice beckons us to witness, and be witnessed by, the living world.

Photo by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.

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