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.

In this episode, acclaimed poet, writer, and translator, David Hinton narrates breath, space, and seed time,

an essay and six-polems sequence from our latest print edition on Time.

Finding an uncanny literal translation of modern sciences spacetime in Yuzhou,

one of ancient China's most foundational cosmological concepts,

David invites us to understand the fabric of time and space as a kind

of primordial breath, the constantly generative tissue of the cosmos. He draws in the pictographic

dimensions of the ideograms for Ujo to see that time is not a metaphysical river flowing past,

but an all-encompassing present,

that inseparable from space renders the cosmos alive. Vast and deep, everything and everywhere,

including all the depths of our mental realm. This being is always moving and changing, he says,

the source from which all things burgeon forth and to which we wholly belong.

A series of poems to end deliver us into an elemental world,

where time is woven with the sacred, and all things, fire, light, wind, radishes,

cottonwoods, and stars are wondrous.

It was wondrous enough as coyote's mischief, or sun and moon losing themselves in the dark

lovemaking of solar eclipse. But in empirical fact, the birthplace of stars is now always everywhere, a quantum

particle burst blossoming out and flaring starlight where the mysterious fabric of gravity

tightens. The more we know about it, the more wondrous it becomes, and we can see through knowing to the question that

remains, being, shadowy being somehow ablaze with itself here, even after thinning and cooling

...