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.

How do we orient ourselves in times of isolation and disorientation?

As Berta and writer J. Drew Lanham encounters his backyard during the pandemic lockdown, he designates it as a newly sanctioned wild-like refuge, a place that is brimming with life,

as he notices the wildlife that inhabits the nearby

far away.

Wildness often visits me on a whim, on the edges of a pre-dawn dream or in the breeze of some imagining of being somewhere other than my state of mind or place.

Since childhood, I've wondered what wildness waited around the next bend on the

narrow woodland path. What skittish fish swam beneath the dark creeks flow, grinning at my hook,

refusing to be fooled, saying no to the baited ruse.

What rare wild bird skulked unseen before flushing from the tangled thicket, making my heart rush?

From farm boy wandering dirt roads, looking up and wishing for the freedom of hawk's wings,

to ornithologist doing the dirty work to save the lives of many feathered things,

the threads of my life, my heart and mind, have converged on ideas of wildness, born of my own

conjuring. Most would define wildness as places unreachable without extraordinary effort,

places far off the beaten path, places removed from our

conveniences and our contrivances.

Names like Denali or River of No Return or Bitteritterroot, or Kataddin,

evoke the perception reinforced by legal definition

that the extreme state of wildness known as wilderness

...