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.

One of the great 20th century poets, Raina Maria Rilke, spoke to the beauty and mystery of the world seen and unseen around him,

how they stirred something deep within, and how they revealed the unity of all things.

Writing on creativity, solitude, the rhythms of nature, and the ephemorality of life, and much more,

his work reached for the transcendent, contemplating what it truly meant to be human.

As we search for meaning and truth in a culture that has stripped itself of the sacred and the real,

his verses can offer us language to articulate inner crises of faith,

the absoluteness of love,

and the well of spiritual yearning that so many of us are experiencing at this time.

This week, in our final podcast of the year,

we are revisiting a special selection of Rilke's poetry

to nourish our hearts and spirits over the holiday period.

25 years ago, Buddhist scholar and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy

collaborated with award-winning poet Anita Burroughs

to translate Rilke's seminal collection of poetry,

the Book of Ours, Love Poems to God, which explores the nature of God who divinely received prayers.

In this reading, excerpted from the album Be Earth Now, produced by Fletcher Tucker at Nome Life Records,

Joanna and Anita recite a selection of these poems,

reminding us of the ever-urgent call to love the world and to being.

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