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.

No landscape is a blank slate, although throughout history, humans have certainly treated it so.

Over and over, we erase our natural and cultural histories

so that we might inscribe new visions of our nature, our potential, our purpose into the body of a place.

Yet histories are enduring presences. No matter how deeply they are buried, they remain. Active and powerful, the past

continues to shape or perhaps haunt, our presence and futures. The very flesh of the earth,

her forms and fractures, are infused with geological memory. And there are legacies, tangible and intangible, built into

the fibers of a place, of a society that cannot truly be obliterated. In this week's

narrated essay, author Lorette E. Savoy meditates on the history of the Chesapeake region

and the vestiges of collision

and rupture that continue to mark its physical and cultural terrains.

As she surfaces ancient geological movements alongside the deliberate construction of race

and colonial America, she considers the entwignment of tectonic and human histories, the ancestral structures that remain in plain sight and out of view. The I'm and The last breath before dawn.

A moment of undefined edges slipping between dark and light,

when it seems one might step through time and space merged.

From the crest of Virginia's Blue Ridge,

a look over what at the close of night appears to be a vast, wind-silenced sea.

Fogbound, mist-covered. Soon, slant light details land contouring beneath diffusing vapor,

contours bound only by the dawn horizon. These lithic swells of the Piedmont, the foot of the mountains,

extend eastward toward the tidewater coastal plain, toward Chesapeake Bay, toward the Atlantic Ocean beyond.

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