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 Marin County.

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

Many of us have been raised on a diet of Western scientific rationalism, a sensibility that has led us to see the earth, and the rivers that

flow through her, as profoundly inanimate. The rivers are purely a service provider, a resource

that irrigates our crops, provides our drinking water, or if it's clean enough, somewhere we can swim.

Sadly, something so intuitive and fundamental has been forgotten amid this way of thinking,

that of the alive nature of rivers.

We have mostly pushed aside the part of ourselves that remembers rivers

as something worshipped and willful, as a presence and a power, as something life-giving and thus

life-holding.

But I expect many of us remember witnessing something special in a river, sensing its potent

energy rushing past us, whether we watch from the river's bank or are immersed in its flow, and that in that witnessing, we felt

more than just matter was present.

I've recently finished reading, Is a River Alive, by the brilliant writer Robert McFarlane,

in which he journeys with rivers in their watersheds in Ecuador, India, and Canada.

In this episode, he joins me to talk about both our collective forgetfulness of our entwignment

with rivers, and the ways we might find our way back into an understanding of their aliveness.

The currents of our conversations take us from how we've conceptually sealed ourselves against rivers as living beings,

to his profound experiences with water defenders, and the rivers themselves,

that slowly began to flood him from within with a sense of what it means to truly see rivers for who they are.

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