Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

One of our oldest questions is what happens after death.

How does spirit leave the body?

And where does it go?

What of us is lost and what remains?

What is the nature of this transcendence?

What transformation takes place?

In this week's essay, Potawatomi botanist, an acclaimed author, Robin Wall Kimmerer,

wonders what the forest has to teach us about the line between life and death.

She visits the Andrews experimental forest in Oregon, where scientists, over the course of 200

years, will study the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth,

what the decomposition of old-growth trees offers to the flourishing of air, soil, water, and life.

As Robin imagines how matter moves in a continuous cycle in the forest,

the breath of a bear is absorbed by the cedar,

which becomes the building blocks of its cells

before it exhales oxygen taken in by the bear.

She considers if within this we can glimpse the nature of the afterlife.

Can this ecology be an experimental theology, she asks? With no clear boundary between the sacred and the

mundane, the forest reveals to her the deep oneness of all things, where nothing ever truly perishes,

but only returns again and again to union with the earth.

...