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.

For centuries, we have used time as a map, a tool to impose order, knowledge, hierarchy, and direction on the world around us.

Yet our present moment refuses to inhabit time within these boundaries. Around the world, buds are blooming too early.

Winters aren't fully arriving.

Time bends as long-buried carbons emerge to haunt the future.

And all the while, we race towards an impending climate catastrophe.

We are running out of time.

And so our conceptualization of time, one articulated through a language of control,

beat the clock, kill time, seize the day, and of progress, wasted time, free time, the arrow of time,

slowly escapes our grip, peels away from what we know revealing the possibilities within a dynamic, unruly form of time.

Earlier this month, I spoke with the artist and writer Jenny O'Dell about her new book,

Saving Time, discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.

We spoke about the social and cultural ideas that underpin standardized, mechanized time,

which is laid an abstract grid over the living world.

Imagining a transition towards a different kind of time,

a gardening of time in which we tune into the rhythms and patterns of the earth,

Jenny invites us to embrace interruption,

breaks in the standard forward march of time that allow us to glimpse the inherent unpredictability

and creativity of every moment.

What choices, what futures might become possible, she asks, if we stepped out of chronos time

...