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.

We are in a time where the overwhelming sense can easily be one of darkness.

The warming of the planet, altering the fundamental nature of the seasons is but one example of an era deepening into destruction.

But what if we could see the light present within the dark?

What if bearing witness to the changing form of the seasons can help us remember the many ways

we are deeply interconnected with them.

This week, acclaimed Irish writer, Carrie Nidharate, offers a deeply beautiful evocation of

the interplay of lightness and darkness in a world increasingly violent and divided.

Asking how we can hold this duality, she looks at how the earth herself dances through cycles

of light and dark, creativity, and destruction. When fear and loss are pervasive, how do we engage

with a life that remains?

Can we see experiences of grief as invitations into feeling our relationality with and love for all living things, she asks?

Can we make light amid the season of darkness.

I grew up in a place that took things, ideas, concepts, fears, griefs, joys, and made them into stories.

I grew up in a place where the eyes of horses were never just the eyes of horses,

where a rainbow was never just a rainbow, where snow meant so much more than the sum of its glistening planet-bright parts.

I grew up in Derry, in the northwest of Ireland, a handful of miles from a man-made border, they tried to cut that green dancing

island of mine into two separate parts.

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