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.

In celebration of Earth Day, we're featuring a special double-bill episode that invites you to offer your ears the polyphony

of sounds and silences that give the planet her voice. Grab a pair of headphones and head

outside to a sunny spot, a trail, or a place where you feel connected with the living world,

and listen to two of our most cherished audio stories.

When the Earth started to sing by biologists and author David G. Haskell,

and sanctuaries of silence and adaptation of our virtual reality experience

featuring acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton.

If you can, before beginning, step away from the busyness of your day and spend a few minutes in silence, awakening your senses.

Close your eyes and let your ears guide you through this one.

How did the vast chorus of sound we hear today, from forests to oceans to human music,

emerge from within life's early community? Where did the living Earth first start to sing?

In this segment, David Haskell hears three billion years of the Earth's sound evolution in the calls and pulses of life around him,

and invites us to be attentive to the songs and stories that thrum in the air.

David brings us into a space of connection with

deep time to listen, so we might remember the ancient relatedness that binds us to the

more than human world, so that we might remember we are both an audience and a participant to the Earth's orchestra.

Sound has always been a tool of connection,

and this experience combines human speech

...