Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. culture and spirituality. Leah Purpura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations.

Her work, On Looking, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her newest collections

are, it shouldn't have been beautiful, and all the fierce tethers.

In her essay, Imagining Burial, Leah delves into the horrified wonder and holiness of death,

exploring burial practices that are intended to nourish the earth

as it has nourished us.

Consider the holy work of buzzards, roadside in the summer heat, hunched over bodies steaming and cold, picking

and tearing back to bone, savoring all that would otherwise rot. Floating on thermals, grounded

and cut fields, buzzards are hybrids of elegance and utility, doing the labor unloved by others, the work of right endings, which is in itself a form of creation.

To be made an enticement, an attractive morsel, smeared with yak butter and left on a mountaintop picked back to bone in the way of Tibetan sky

burial, I'd go for that if given the chance. Hard to come by as an option in Baltimore.

Still, systems of regeneration abound. Say, shopping in thrift stores, an easier way to keep the useful in motion, slipping into another's

garment, my arm in his sleeve, leg and her jeans, a bequeathing, an inheritance.

All those objects hauled from sheds, burnished with oil, sweat, rain, heat, dirt, all those flawed but able things,

holding light still, inscribed by their days. At the farmer's market, it's the seconds I'm after.

Peaches, tomatoes, not for the markdown, just that imperfections are misjudged.

If choices were based on cycles and time, not hierarchies of beauty, then the seconds, speckled, soft, unround, and windfallen, would be firsts.

The ones you know to take now and eat, unequivocally ripe,

who need us to complete them, or the sweetness they were raised up for is lost.

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