Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Our podcast features in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads,

connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Camille T. Dungie is an award-winning author, poet, editor, and professor.

Her work includes the collection of essays, guidebook to relative strangers.

The poetry collections, Trophic Cascade, Suck on the Mero, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison.

She edited Black Nature, four centuries of African American nature poetry,

and has received numerous honors, including an American Book Award

and two NAACP Image Award nominations.

In this essay, Camille reflects on the journey of seeds,

how much of what we plant in our gardens was brought to our soils during the slave trade

and that within our food lies a legacy of trauma and triumph.

Planting food she contends, even in contaminated soils,

becomes both an acknowledgement of grief and a celebration of the beauty of growing.

For months now, I've been living through the grief of deaths, devastation, and debilitating disease.

I am naming none of these things in an abstract, global sense, though they are pervasive

conditions of our times. I am talking about the deaths of family,

the failure of this country to provide safety to dear friends.

I am talking about grief and exhaustion

and autoimmune flares that make it difficult daily to get out of bed.

I'm talking about seeming to run out of prospects.

But this week, we pulled several cubic feet of rock from our yard. Now the soil is ready to receive pole beans a friend gifted me last summer.

Beans from a line of seed passed on by survivors since the 1838 Trail of Tears. Soon I will make a space in my garden

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