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.

What power is held within the gaze?

When we bring intention to the act of seeing, what becomes visible.

And we center the living world in our attention,

behold something or someplace in all its beauty and pain.

We enter into relationship with it.

Its presence becomes known to us.

But to have the courage to look during our time of great change

is becoming ever harder. To turn to face

suffering, destruction, complicated histories, and dire futures. Even to acknowledge light amid

the darkness can feel impossible. Yet when we are attentive and aware, seeing without preconceptions, truly bearing witness,

what spaces of healing, transformation, and love can emerge.

In this week's narrated essay, writer Natalie Rose Richardson steps into the curious world of birdwatching

as she explores how to truly

see in a society that foster short and narrow attention spans. Seeking guidance from

Chicago historian Sherry Williams, an ornithologist and poet Jay Drew Lanham, she threads

together the wonder of bird migration and the Great Migration, the movement

of six million black Americans out of the rural South and begins to enter landscapes, both physical

and cultural, with her eyes wide open.

1. Sherry Williams, opening the door with an assaulting smile and waving away my apology with her hands, does not seem to care that I am late.

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