Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn 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.

Thank you. culture and spirituality. David Abram is a cultural ecologist and philosopher.

He is the author of Becoming Animal, an Earthly Cosmology,

and The Spell of the sensuous,

perception and language in a more than human world.

As we face the paradoxes and ambiguities enmeshed with the COVID-19 pandemic,

David finds beauty in the midst of shuddering terror.

As we're isolated in this uncertain time, he writes,

we can turn to the more than human world

to empower our empathy for each other.

Right now, the earthly community of life, the more than human collective, is getting a chance to catch its breath without the weight of our incessant industry upon its chest.

The terrifying nightmare barreling through human society in these weeks has forced the gears of the

mega machine, all that complex churning of commerce, all this steadily speeding up progress,

to grind to a halt. And so, as you've likely noticed, the land itself is stirring and starting

to stretch its limbs,

long-forgotten sensory organs beginning to sip the air and sample the water,

grasses and needles drinking in sky without the intermediating sting of a chemical haze.

The reports of abundant fish returning to the effluent clogged canals of Venice

may not be true. Mostly, it seems, the usual murkiness of those canals is clearing due to the

circumstance that ceaseless boat traffic is not churning up those waterways. And so it's become

...