Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day, Marine County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality. This week, author and poet Zemarie Furman shares a story

about deep listening, immersed in the silences and sounds of Idaho's wild remote landscapes.

Camping in the Frank Church Wilderness and by Twin Lakes, she listens in order to remember

what colonial history has tried to erase. In the roll of thunder, the voice of the river emptied

of salmon, and the howl of wolves in the black of night,

she finds echoes of the ancestral memories of the people who once live close to this land.

Through cyclical evocation, she contemplates her belief that memory moves in the opposite direction of prayer and wish, down into the earth.

Recognizing herself as a person of ground, she listens to the land speak

so that she might remember and root herself in the memories of her ancestors

and carry them forward as a light amid the darkness. It was a rainy night amid the darkness.

It was a rainy night, but not where we lay.

We were curled up on the ground in the Frank Church wilderness.

Our tent flaps were open because the rain was on

the ridge lines south of us. But those ridge lines filled the frame of the open doors of our tent,

so we lay in the dark, wide-eyed and more alive than we would normally be at night, or at all.

Our old dog, Siska, was between us, my partner and me. Our older dog, Carhart, was

fresh in her grave, and I still held dents in my flesh from where I lay on the earth,

two nights in a row, my ear to the ground, listening for a heartbeat or her breathing,

...