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.

Having journeyed through initiation, rested in the ashes, and reached for deep roots over the last few weeks.

We have now arrived at futures, the final chapter of our exploration of living with the unknown.

We close this series with five stories that ask what creative possibilities are emerging in this time and what is waiting

to be embodied.

In this meditative exploration on listening and language, our staff writer Chelsea

Steinerer, witnesses her daughter learning to speak and wonders how to listen for a language of mothering that is in service to all of

life's beings.

My first fragment of memory is of my mother. We are standing together in golden waving grass. There is the sense

that the sun is setting behind us, because what I see in the memory is not our physical bodies,

but our shadows cast before us, wavering as the grass bends and circles in the wind. My mother and I are holding hands,

and in our silhouettes there is no distinction between where she ends and I begin, and the grass

of the rolling plains grows and reaches through our conjoined image.

I'm not sure that this memory is of a real moment.

Probably something like this did happen, whether or not my impression of it is true.

When I was one and two years old, we lived on a Nature Conservancy Preserve,

tens of thousands of acres along the Niagara Riverrera River in north-central,

Nebraska, a landscape of sand hills, prairie, burr oaks, and bison, a landscape of restoration situated within a wider, fraught history of colonization and displacement.

Real or not, this image has been with me for a very long time.

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