Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. culture and spirituality. Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw novelist, essayist, poet, and environmentalist.

She is the author of numerous works, including People of the Whale and Mean Spirit,

winner of the Oklahoma Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

For Linda, Hope lives where faith has fallen away.

In her essay, Ancient Root, she shares how,

during an encounter with caged elephants,

she experiences a wave of profound and startling love in the presence of

beings so very different from and so very like ourselves. What might we learn about the mystery of

humanity, she asks, in learning to approach the mystery embodied in our fellow creatures?

Hope lives deeper in my heart than faith.

It is with hope that I work each day,

and at night I curve myself into a quilt of hope's many designs stitched together.

It is hope that keeps my spirit alive intact and searching for the right work to follow

what I feel from this earth.

In these days, more of us are moving toward a wholeness in relationship with the land and other living beings.

In that relationship is meaning and hope that all will survive.

For this one woman, faith doesn't seem like enough to sustain life around me.

Maybe it walked away from me as a native woman, as it has betrayed our nations.

Faith isn't solid enough for me in the world of spirit or the lost ecosystems we once cared for.

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