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.

Cultures once revolved around stories that connected our outer senses with our inner senses,

allowing us to participate in something much greater

than ourselves. Today, we need stories that can help us hold the complexity of our moment,

the unfolding catastrophe we're experiencing, and the love we feel for our burning world.

In this second talk from our Song of the Season's retreat that we

held at the Whippey Institute, I talk about how stories can help us embody a love for the earth

that includes pain and loss as much as it includes reverence. Much of the impetus behind

Emergence magazine is to create and share stories that can hold such paradoxes,

that can help us face catastrophe and awaken love,

while also telling an emerging story of this time.

Story is a very powerful alchemical vehicle of transformation.

And for me, good stories are rooted in a living and breathing earth.

The story told by the seasons, regardless of where one is in the world,

invites us into a space that holds catastrophe, love, and loss,

because they themselves do this in their cycles of birth and growth and decay and death.

Practical reverence, as Robin Wall Kimmerer so beautifully puts it, is embedded in these kinds of stories

that help weave us back into the cycles that underpin all of existence.

Our first stories and creation myths centered on holding a practical reverence

...