Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

For the past decade, journalist Paul Salopek has been on an epic journey retracing the migration pathway of some of the earliest humans, traveling

from Africa's Rift Valley, across the Middle East and Asia. The last time I checked, he was

in South Korea. And eventually, he'll arrive at the southern tip of Chile. The most miraculous part

of this 24,000-mile passage is that it's on foot.

It's no surprise then that Paul's deeply contemplative about the act of walking.

In one of my favorite of his dispatches from National Geographic, he writes,

Walking, you learn each new landscape the way you might explore the face of a lover,

up close, by grazing your fingertips over the features without distraction.

It's a wonderful testament to how walking can bring us into intimate relationship with the earth.

This week, we returned to my interview from early last year with Paul as he was passing through

the Liaoning Province in northeastern China.

Moving through the world as our ancestors did, Paul shares how he's become attuned to the way time passes through us and around us. From the ancient pulse of the

earth underfoot to the fury of mechanized time that rampages through our urban centers,

he shares his profound experiences of timelessness, which he dubs sacramental time, that bring together

mind and body and landscape into a conversation and

invites us to remember how such a simple practice is walking can help us rediscover the beauty

and ephemerality of the world around us. Paul, it's great to speak with you today.

It's good to be here.

Where are you talking to me from right now? I'm in the

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