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.

When we define something, we inherently place limits around it, declaring where it ends and something

else begins.

And yet, we increasingly learn, through mycology, biology, ecology, and oftentimes through

our own spiritual experiences, that the boundary between life and death, existence and

non-existence, is porous. One bleeds into the other.

The border is not fixed.

These two things shift in relationship to each other.

And often we are disturbed by the ambiguity of this,

how close life sits to the margins of death.

And so we often find ourselves shunning decay,

turning away from the life that can be found within it.

Keeping vigil by his dying father's bedside,

ecosystem ecologist Liam Hennegan contemplates the blurred edges of life, and what vanishes and what remains when

life tips into death.

Turning to the lessons of decay evident all around us, leaves, solar systems, friendships,

our own aging bodies.

He sees the inescapable laws of entropy,

...