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

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story,

exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Perhaps nowhere is the Earth's cycle of creation and destruction,

more deeply embodied than in the fierce and generous waters of the Ganga. Traversing through 2,500 kilometers of India's soil,

she bestows the gift of Himalayan silt upon its plains,

creating some of the most fertile agricultural lands in the world,

and sustaining hundreds of millions of people.

Not only does the river nourish in this sense,

but it also offers its waters as a sacrament,

its body a blessed vessel of purification.

Yet come monsoon season, a change of heart.

The Ganga floods, eroding banks, displacing communities,

gulping entire villages and farms.

Its path ephemeral, the river migrates, siphoning out of old channels and surging

into new ones.

Visiting West Bengal during monsoon season, writer and photographer Arati Komermoura bears witness to all that is formed and

all that is destroyed in the swell and retreat of the Ganga.

Struck by the immense power of the ancient river, a deity alive and accessible, benevolent

and merciless, she wonders how human activity will continue to both affect and be determined

by the will of its waters.

...