Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Nick Hunt is a writer, journalist, and the author of Where the Wild Winds Are,

and Walking the Woods and the Water.

In this essay, Nick is led through the wildly varied textures of Bia Louisa,

Europe's largest surviving primeval forest,

where life and death transform into one another with vigorous entanglement.

As he traces the history of the European forest,

from the retreat of the glaciers through the advent of agriculture, we see a battle between light and shadow, clearing and woods.

The universe is an oak, unfathomably tall. Its branches stretch to heaven and its roots reach

into the underworld, with the mortal realm as its stump. Like ants we live our lives in the

fissures of its bark. At its top sits Peroon, god of the sky, fertility, thunderstorms,

metal and war, associated with the axe,

whose body takes the form of an eagle perched in its uppermost branches.

Around its roots twines Veles, whose body takes the form of a snake, god of the underworld.

They are always fighting. Veles creeps up from the earth to steal the cattle of Perun,

slipping in and out of shadows, friendly with the darkness. Perun chases him away with dazzling bolts of

lightning that make the world as bright as day, but he never catches him. He never will catch him.

Dry weather is the victory of Veles,

rain the victory of Perun, and thunderstorms are battles in the eternal war between them.

If lightning hits the earth near you, it is probably good luck.

As oak is sacred to Perun, willow is sacred to velles, and in many ways the trees and

their gods act as opposites.

...