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.

A few years ago, I interviewed the poet, translator, an author David Hinton, about his work,

and how he has traced the shifts in human consciousness

that have distanced us from a living world. It felt apt to re-share this conversation on the

podcast, as within it he shares many ideas that echo our recent exploration of the seasons,

from how offering attention to the beauty of simple moments like birdsong

and blossom fall can bring us into a particular quality of awareness to how the cycles of absence

and presence in the seasons are mirrored by the cycles of form and emptiness in our own inner worlds.

On the seasons that play out within self and land, he says,

winter is a kind of pregnant emptiness.

Spring emerges out of that,

and life flourishes in summer and then dies back into that emptiness of winter and the autumn.

Drawing on Taoist and Chan Buddhist philosophies,

David offers an ethics tempered by love and kinship

as a path to recognizing this,

and the many other ways our consciousness is in continuity with the earth. David, I want to start our conversation today by asking you to read a poem.

The poem that underpins much of what you explore in your new book, Wild Mind, Wild Earth.

An ancient Chinese poem that you suggest holds within it

an ethics that we so desperately need at this time of great ecological crisis.

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