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.

Water is amorphous, both a buoy and a torrent. It can be an ending, a sinking, a graveyard, a depth of suffering.

It can be a reflection of resilience and resistance, an anchorage of force.

It cannot be marked or destroyed.

By these virtues, it becomes a sight of memory and an agent of connection.

As our physical and cultural landscapes transform around us, what memories remain held by water,

what histories of pain and destruction, what hallowed moments are carried in its currents,

taken into its body like shards of glass, and resurfaced to haunt us and to guide us.

In this profound essay,

writer and poet, Macacia Tolbert

wades into the liminal haunted space

that exists between water and black memory.

As she navigates black lineages of thinking and practice, she comes to the meeting

place of past and present, life and death, slavery and freedom, and embarked on her own return

to water.

I went down to the river to remind myself of the other language, Jerome Ellis.

I was born a few minutes from the Potomac River.

Less than a month ago, I packed what I had and headed back to Virginia.

I knew some of what I'd find there.

Oysters, northern water snakes, an array of fish that have made their way through centuries.

...