Welcome to the Emergence Magazine podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee,

host of this show recorded on the unseated lands of the Coast Mewak peoples in present-day Marin County.

In each episode, we explore the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality,

with the world's leading ecological thinkers, writers,

poets, and storytellers, through in-depth conversations, author-narrated essays, poetry, and

nature connection practices.

This week, Terry Tempest Williams joins me to talk about her new book, The Glorians,

which I truly loved. It's a profound invitation to be attentive to beauty, while never turning

away from grief as an opportunity to experience love.

My takeaway from our conversation,

and one of the profound things Terry is able to offer is a sense of how we can hold the paradoxes of our moment.

How love and despair, loss and beauty,

can be known and felt completely simultaneously,

each revealing a different face of what it means to be fully present and alive with earth and the great mystery that surrounds us.

To experience each is to encounter grace, is to fuse with something greater than ourselves.

In other words, it is to meet a glorian.

She speaks to me about her ongoing discovery of what this term means,

and how engaging with glorians as part of the spiritual work needed in our moment,

where we find greater and greater tension between a way of being seeking

atonement for what we have done to the earth, and a way of being that's nostalgic for committing

unbridled destruction, oblivious to consequence. How do we bring these two things together in prayer,

...