Emergence Magazine Podcast

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On Time, Mystery, and Kinship – A Conversation with Jane Hirshfield Nov 04, 2025

Show notes

We return to one of our most in-depth interviews this week: a conversation with poet Jane Hirshfield, who has contributed a new poem to our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons. Reciting several poems from her prolific body of work, including Time Thinks of Time, she speaks about how her Zen practice has led her to embrace the largeness of time’s mystery. She shares how this inner “spaciousness,” present in many of her poems, can uncover intimacy with both the ordinary and the divine.

Read the transcript.

Read Jane’s poem “Time Thinks of Time.”

Photo by Curt Richter.

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Strange New World - Roy Scranton Oct 28, 2025

Show notes

Probing the flatness of his Midwestern landscape, Roy Scranton challenges us to peer beyond what meets the eye to engage more thoughtfully with a place’s ecological, geological, and cosmological dimensions. What first appears to him as farmland, highways, and worn industrial sprawl in his new home of South Bend, Indiana, begins under sustained attention to disclose rich layers of physical and temporal meaning. Roy invites us to practice this same attentiveness, allowing ourselves to be changed by the stories that make a place new and strange, and the mundane alive with resonance.

Read the transcript.

Artwork by Nico Krijno.

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Offering Our Attention with Humility – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee Oct 21, 2025

Show notes

In this final talk of a three-part series, Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks about two essential elements needed if we are to tend to a relationship of reverence with the Earth: humility and offering. To ground ourselves in respect for the power of the Earth, and respond to Her unconditional generosity, we can begin by remembering to de-center our needs, and instead ask ourselves: What attitude towards the seasons can help me develop a relationship to place? How can I respond with love not only to the wonder, but to the pain of the Earth? When we are rooted in this space of humility and offering, we can remain open and present with Her beauty and loss.

Read the transcript.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Artwork by Thoth Adan

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A Story of Requiem, Invitation, and Celebration – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee Oct 14, 2025

Show notes

We are in need of stories that can help us navigate the complexity of our moment: both the unfolding ecological catastrophe and the love we feel for our burning world. This second talk in a series given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at our Song of the Seasons retreat on Whidbey Island explores how the story of birth, growth, decay, and death told by the seasons, regardless of where one is in the world, invites us into a space of reverence that offers a container for holding love and loss amid the vast ecological changes reshaping our Earth.

Read the transcript.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Artwork by Thoth Adan.

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Unfurling the Spiral – A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee Oct 07, 2025

Show notes

As an introduction to the themes within our latest print volume, Seasons, we’re sharing a series of talks over the next few weeks given by Emergence executive editor and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at our Song of the Seasons retreat on Whidbey Island. This first talk explores the cyclical nature of the seasons, and how when we devote our attention to these cycles over time, their continuous variation reveals itself, unfurling like a spiral that draws us deeper into kinship with the Earth. If we find the courage to remember ourselves not as impervious to the rhythms of the seasons, but as profoundly connected to them, we can begin to open to their sacred invitation.

Read the transcript.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Artwork by Thoth Adan.

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Thin White Line – Maya Pace Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

After the destructive fires of 2020, writer and facilitator Maya Pace awakens to how California’s essential dry, scorched nature has been repressed to realize a vision of economic and social prosperity across the state. Searching for what it means to love a place that is harsh, uncomfortable, or increasingly unfamiliar, she connects with communities living in landscapes removed from our ideals of paradise. What does it mean to live fully in the reality of a place, rather than how we wish it to be? she asks. What if our relationship with the land grew not from a practice of control, but from surrender?

Read the essay.

Photo by Young Suh.

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Making the Invisible Visible – A Conversation with Ersin Han Ersin Sep 23, 2025

Show notes

A companion to our Breathing with the Forest feature, this conversation from our 2023 Shifting Landscapes exhibition with Marshmallow Laser Feast director Ersin Han Ersin explores the importance of imagination in making visible the often invisible threads that bind us together with the living world. He talks about the collective’s work creating spaces where people can step into deliberate acts of connection with the more-than-human, and how art can allow us to embody the experiences of other beings by playing with the plasticity of our perception.

Read the transcript.

Explore Breathing with the Forest online experience.

Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast and Sandra Ciampone.

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Museum of Color – Stephanie Krzywonos Sep 16, 2025

Show notes

Nonfiction writer Stephanie Krzywonos opens a door into the histories of our most iconic and desired pigments, from ochre to bone black, lapis lazuli to mummy brown. In our earliest attempts to recreate the magnificent colors of Earth for our art, garments, make-up, and more, we mixed and alchemized matter drawn from the flesh of the Earth Herself. Stephanie follows a spectrum of colors from these origins, through the entangled webs of colonialism, capitalism, and the more-than-human world, to their synthetic replication and mass production, inviting us to see how our colors hold stories of both lightness and darkness.

Read the essay.

Artwork by Studio Airport.

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Thirty Years – Annabel Howard Sep 09, 2025

Show notes

What if we had only decades left before the final harvest capable of feeding the world? Accustomed to Earth’s abundance year after year, can we imagine an end to something so eternal? In thirty short passages, from pruning dandelions with her four-year-old to grappling with the mathematical theory of infinity, art historian and writer Annabel Howard moves through a mind-warping process of fathoming a world where the cycles that have sustained us since the beginning of time cease. Following her fascination with the apocalyptic imagery in Botticelli’s Mystical Nativity, she contemplates how imagining the end of the infinite is not radical for our time, but rather an enduring way of giving shape to inconceivable realities. Like all of us, she reaches for certitude amid the fear of a world aflame, only to glimpse the paradox of apocalypse: that in ending there lies beginning.

Read the essay.

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Widening Circles — A Conversation with Joanna Macy Sep 02, 2025

Show notes

In honor of the recent passing of the eco-philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and dear friend Joanna Macy, we return to our interview with her from 2018. In this conversation, she traces the ways a life-long heart connection with the living world cultivated a resounding ecological awareness within her work and spirituality; and explores how we might return to an “ecological self” as a way to be of service amid the climate catastrophe. Joanna was also a seminal translator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, finding his contemplations on the entwinement of grief, beauty, and spiritual life deeply resonant. You can hear Joanna recite, alongside Anita Burrows, a selection of their translations in our audio story Be Earth Now.

Read the interview transcript.

Photo by Adam Loften.

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