Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Carl Phillips is the author of numerous books, including Wild as the Wind, reconnaissance, riding westward and the rest of love.

In this poetic essay, Carl discerns the interplay between human bodies and the bodies of trees,

between reality and imagination, and between memory and presence.

The language of trees, he writes, creates a space where there is no judgment, intention, or need.

What happened back there, among the trees is only as untenable as you allow yourself or just decide to believe it is.

It happened, and now it's over.

And the end feels, to you at least, both like the end of a long pilgrimage, and like the end of a well-reasoned, irrefutable argument, which is its own form of pilgrimage,

don't both depend on stamina and faith in the right proportions?

Wasn't the point at the end, persuasion?

I used to speak in terms of shadowlands, by which I meant, I think, some space where what transpires between

two bodies and what gets transacted almost look the same.

I'd say a thing like, there's a kind of shadow land that one body makes entering another,

and there's a shadow land the body contains always, within itself, without resolution, as mystery a little more often perhaps should be.

And I'd call it a poem, and it looked like one.

But how it felt was more like saying aloud the words, rescue me, long enough that it almost seemed plausible that mere saying could turn the light to

twilight and the twilight dark. I lived in the world that, for lack of a prettier word,

I'd call tangible, where risk meant risk, it seemed, and violation, violation, not psychological, but solid things, for they each cast a shadow

as only a solid thing so I'd been told, could, though I had tried to touch them, violation,

risk, and each time my hands touched nothing.

My earliest memory of trees is of a particular fig tree in the yard of the first house I remember in Portland, Oregon. I was five at the most. Sometimes what I remember is playing in the shade

of it, and at other times the bees that seem to bloom from inside the windfalls, though it seems

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