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, Marine County.

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

culture, and spirituality.

In companion to our latest print edition on The Seasons, we're sharing a series of conversations

with its contributors that delve deeper

into the themes of requiem, invitation, and celebration that we explore in the issue. In this conversation,

biologist David G. Haskell, an author and naturalist Dara McAnulty, join me to speak about their essays and what a celebration

of each season's offerings means in a colonized, commercialized, and highly technological world.

David and Dara share the belief that our senses are the primary doorways through which we build

a relationship with place. Through encounters with wildflower

explosions, bees dusted with spring pollen, and the silence present in the depths of winter,

we are invited into a direct sensory response of the seasons, rather than the diluted versions of

seasonality, often delivered through algorithms and marketing cycles.

We talk about knowing the seasons as both collective cultural experiences

and deeply interior ones, upheld by memory, tradition, and symbols,

the negative joy of witnessing seasonal moments that speak of beauty and loss,

and how the act of simply offering our attention to the passage of the seasons

is perhaps all that is needed to begin meeting them in a space of celebration.

Thank you, Emmanuel. It's delight to to be here and it's a pleasure to join Dara here too.

Oh, thank you, David and Emmanuel, for the space that we're having to be able to talk about,

...