Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel 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.

What happens when we open ourselves towards a more expansive space amid the complexity of crisis?

A space that compels us to be with rather than run away from uncertainty

and emptiness. And what tools do we have within that that can shift crisis from something

that undoes us into something that transforms us? For me, these questions are increasingly

urgent as our turning political and ecological

tides take us ever closer to catastrophe.

This week, he returned to my conversation with Australian writer and Zen Roshi Susan Murphy,

who immerses us in the ancient tradition of the Zen koen. She talks about the power of the not knowing mind to open a treasury of resources for meeting the climate crisis,

sharing along the way several coens from Zen masters that push at the boundaries of our consciousness.

A co-in has the power to unfold us in much the same way crisis unfolds us, Susan says.

It is the power to draw us deeper into kinship with creation, showing us we are not separate from it.

She reminds us that the Earth herself is a Cohen, waiting to be known, so she beckons us to say yes to uncertainty,

and to remember ourselves as part of the Earth's mystery.

Susan, it's wonderful to be in conversation with you today. Thanks so much for being on the show.

It's very entirely my pleasure.

As I think you know, one of the primary aspects of our work at emergence

is exploring the spiritual dimension of the ecological crisis that we're in

and both questioning and responding to the unraveling of our world

...