Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Daisy Hildyard is the author of The Second Body and Hunters in the Snow.

In this essay, Daisy examines how the COVID-19 pandemic

has drawn our attention toward the space between things.

She notes that these negative spaces reveal relationships

that normally lie beyond the faculties of our perception.

The intertwinement of our lives, human, plant, animal, have become more apparent.

Our lives traced through other beings and their lives traced through our own.

Now is a time to think negatively.

At some point in the last year, two viruses were coexisting inside one animal's body.

Listener, they got together.

A novel virus was formed, scientists currently propose, inside a pangolin's body, from a reservoir in a rhinole office, bat.

This virus, a shimmerer, was able to cross species boundaries.

In late 2019, it began to communicate itself through human bodies.

As the spread of the virus through the human population gained momentum, people from many different parts of the planet gained a new sensitivity to previously unnoticed worlds. These were the worlds of negative space,

the spaces between subjects, worlds which had been invisible, transparent or simply overlooked.

A sneeze disperses around the room in a pearly cloud. Populations of millions are hosted on a fingertip.

Body warmth from another person's hand leaks only slowly out of a coin or a door handle.

Phenomena that lie beyond the faculties of human perception have become the subjects of

widespread mainstream public health campaigns,

attempting to make human minds alert to those minuscule living beings who occupy the negative zone between skin and air.

...