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.

One of Earth's greatest secrets is the inner workings, the minute mechanisms of creaturely migrations.

We are often told that migratory species rely on a kind of internal clock, perhaps a compass or

a map, to enact their cyclical journeys.

Yet such instrumental metaphors only imply a separation between land and creature, and do little to explain how these animals find their way,

generation after generation, across the world.

And so what guides these creatures across the planet?

Is it some biological tug, some bodily memory that draws them into a throng of motion,

and back to what can only be described as home.

Upon witnessing such lively kinetics, the flurry of traveling swifts, the boisterous arrival of humpback whales and warmer waters,

the eyes widen, the breath catches, and for a brief second you are awash in the grace of movement,

the utter beauty and mystery of a living world.

In this essay, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram reflects on the deep intelligence

that lies at the heart of migration patterns.

Observing cranes, butterflies, and salmon

in the course of their annual pilgrimages,

he wonders if they could be active expressions

of the Earth itself.

Imagining such movements as gestures of the planet's pulse,

David considers if we too,

...