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.

Fred Bonson is the author of Soil and Sacrament, a spiritual memoir of food and faith, and is a regular

contributor to emergence, having written about Thomas Merton and most recently the Church

Forests of Ethiopia. In this personal essay, Fred pursues a contemplative inner life in the

midst of an outer reality filled with uncertainty.

As he ponderes the role of prayer in collective healing,

he looks to ancient Christian monks for guidance and how to direct our gaze and maintain an attentive heart.

One.

On this late October morning, when I climb the stairs to begin my morning practice,

I look out my office window to see, in mid-flight, the covey of Hungarian partridges. The Huns, as they called here in Montana,

have flown down from an adjoining wheat field on a small rise to the north. On the ground lies

10 inches of new snow. After a series of short flights, the Huns flit and hop across the snow, finally alighting on

the lee side of a retaining wall, where they gather into a loose familial cluster.

One by one, they burrow down into the snow to make small concavities, little cells open to the sky.

Earlier this summer I counted ten of them. Today, only eight.

The temperature hovers in the single digits, and the next few nights are expected to dip well below zero.

I wonder how they will fare this coming winter.

2.

Most mornings I rise early before my sons.

In warmer months I haul my Zafu and Zapatan onto the tiny wooden deck,

...