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, Marine County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the

threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

For this episode, I'm sharing a keynote talk I gave in July as part of a conference on spiritual

ecology and peace building at St. Ethelberger Center for Reconciliation and Peace in London,

on the theme of memory, praise, spirit, and matter.

In the talk, I explore how spiritual ecology, while a framework for understanding and navigating

the spiritual dimension of the polychrisis we are in, is at its root a memory, a memory

of living in kinship with the earth and recognizing her as alive.

This spiritual connection that we share with the earth

has been veiled by our belief that the earth is separate from us

and a resource to be exploited.

And for so many of us has become a memory

rather than an embodied lived experience.

For me, one of the most important questions of our moment is how can we

reawaken this memory and rekindle this connection with the earth, embracing a way of being that

returns us to this ancient truth. And I feel that praise and prayer and the many forms it takes,

whether from within a religious

or spiritual tradition or outside of one, is central to this return, as it can both reawaken

this connection and foster a space of listening and reverence from which we can sweep away

...