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

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Charles Foster is the author of more than 20 books, including being a beast, adventures across the species

divide, the screaming sky, and his latest being a human.

In this essay, Charles considers his role as a writer seeking to experience and express

communion with the more than human world,

and begins to wonder if language can do anything other than constrain and tame the tangled wild.

I'm losing confidence in words. This is worrying, on many levels. The least significant is that I use

words to earn my living. The two most significant are, first, that I use words to tell my children

I love them, and second, that my whole experience of the world

is mediated through words. I've a vertiginous fear that if words prove untrustworthy, I won't be

able to know anything about anything, and isn't some sort of knowledge needed to a relationship,

which is all we have. This is my own crisis.

I don't expect any sympathy,

but one small corollary might be interesting.

That's the issue of whether any nature writing is valuable.

There's a wood near us.

I can't see the wood for the words.

Probably the wood is wonderful. My intuition tells me it is,

but unless intuition is knowledge, I really don't know. And even if intuition is knowledge,

...