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.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

She is the best-selling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

In this special Earth Week episode, Robin explores worlds made by mosses.

Beans who remember when rock and leaf first united on earth's dry land,

and when skywomen first danced in gratitude, atop turtles back.

One summer day in Alaska, I stood within a glacial cave, blue and strange beneath the ice.

I heard the plunk of drips falling into the meltwater pool and shivered in the cold blue light. I listened to the calls of ice becoming water.

There's a story that begins here. Or maybe it ends. It depends on us.

The last time the glaciers melted here in the Adirondacks, they left this boulder field behind. Hundreds of

glacial erratics, scraped from the ancient Laurentian shield, rolled here beneath the ice sheet,

dot the landscape. Today their scarred granite surfaces are robed in mosses. The air itself is charged with their radiant green.

The boulders look like a herd of ice-age musk oxen, frozen in place with a thick coat of green fur,

grazing beneath a post-plicein canopy of birches, maples, and hemlocks. As a bribeco-ecologist, I've spent decades

observing these islands of mossy rock. What seems like a lifetime to me is barely an eye-blink

in the 10,000-year rest that allowed these rolling stones to gather some moss. Mosses and rocks take the long view.

Mosses, I think, are like time made visible. They create a kind of botanical forgetting.

Shoot by tiny shoot, the past is obscured in green.

That's why we have stories, so we can remember.

The mosses remember that this is not the first time the glaciers have melted.

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