Our common nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me,

Anna Gonzalez, through this complicated country.

We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails, to meet people,

hear their stories, their poetry, and of course, play some music,

all to reconnect to nature, and get closer to the things we're missing.

Listen to Our Common Nature from WNYC wherever you get podcasts.

Hi, wild listeners. Before the episode starts, I wanted to come on and do a quick shout-out.

We're working on lots of new and fresh Patreon content for you all,

and part of that means that we have polls for you to participate in. So thanks to everyone who

participated in our Dragonfly poll on Patreon about what you're curious about. Those are great

questions. I'm going to shout out just a few of you, Tiffany, Jason M, Merrily S, Tim H, Julia R, Michael D,

and The Other Jacob. What a great Patreon handle that is. Thanks again for all your ideas.

Wonderful. Okay, enjoy the show.

Waves lapped along the shoreline of Cortez Island in British Columbia.

A perfectly large boulder sat at the water's edge.

That's the scene Brooke Williams encountered when he was taking a break from a science conference he was attending.

He'd snuck away for some fresh air between sessions. He laid himself out on top of the

boulder. I was supposed to be reading this paper for this conference and either I was very tired or the

paper was very boring but it didn't take long for me to like fall right asleep. And I was sort of on the edge of this island. And for a while I

thought in my dream, am I dreaming or is this real? Brooke is a naturalist, an author, and teaches

creative writing at Colby College in Maine. And this dream would turn out to be a pivotal moment in his life

and radically changed it. In this dream, he saw a boat motor into the bay. A woman was driving it.

...