Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Amad Jamad Johnson is the author of Darktown Follies, Red Summer, and Imperial Liquor.

In this essay, Amad explores the loneliness and fear that arise in the wake of inexplicable tragedy, where personal losses highlight histories of suffering and the deep uncertainties of our time.

This fact has always been true, but feels more so in the midst of a pandemic.

Massive job losses, food insecurity, climate chaos, and the national uprising is provoked

by ongoing racial injustice and police unprecedented in the history of the world.

But then you read James Baldwin.

Our neighbors, Robin and Beth, were murdered. They lived across the street and a few doors down from us. We had been under safer at-home orders in Wisconsin for just two weeks, still cycling through stages of grief

over canceled plane tickets, hotel reservations, and sporting events, trying to figure out

how to homeschool our kids while also working online.

I was obsessed with cable news and staring at my checking account.

I think I wanted to believe the pandemic was a hoax, or I was waiting for an all-clear,

the opposite of a tornado siren. I kept telling myself, you're from Compton,

what can this world throw at you that wasn't already waiting at your doorstep to terrify you as a

child? Of course, this was an eternity ago, before two weeks became two months, when researchers

were just beginning to question the summer, and there was complete silence about the fall.

I was moving through the world in a fog.

Every chart predicting the spread of the virus was a kick in the stomach.

This was the end of March, early spring, which for the upper Midwest could mean the dead of winter.

A jogger found Robin and Beth's bodies in a ditch in the arboretum, less than five minutes from

...