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.

In this essay, Fred Banson offers a tribute to the preeminent nature writer Barry Lopez.

Originally published in Notre Dame magazine, where you're republishing an unbroken grace

to commemorate the first anniversary of Barry's death that features some of the last recordings

Barry made. In 2018, Fred spent several days with Barry at his long-time home in Finrock, Oregon, along the Mackenzie River.

As he recalls the time that the two spent together beneath Old Grove Douglas firs,

Fred reflects on the life of this great writer whose numinous encounters and lifelong adoration

of mystery informed his practice of living in the service of the power of story as a way to

illuminate and heal.

When I first arrived at the home of Barry Lopez when November Day in 2018, he pointed to a fresh

Douglas fir stump and said, we had to put down that tree. The Douglas fir was one of many

old-growth trees surrounding Barry's home at Finrock, Oregon, along the McKinsey River.

The tree had become diseased, and Barry worried that it might fall in the house.

So a few days before my visit, he and a neighbor got out their chainsaws and put down the tree.

That's the phrase Barry used, put down, as one might speak with regret after euthanizing an animal.

Thirteen years earlier, I discovered Barry's work and knew I'd found a writer I wanted to learn from.

He wrote convincingly about the power of the natural world to heal us, about numerous encounters with wild animals, about the seemingly forgotten qualities of reverence, mutuality, and

ecological humility he found in traditional cultures.

Though ostensibly I was there to conduct a magazine interview, I'd really come because I was in despair over the

...