Emergence Magazine Podcast

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

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.
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Photo by Bill Heath

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.

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

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