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. For Christian mystic Thomas Merton, life was not to be divided

into the sacred and the secular. Rather, all was alive with divine presence. Stans of redwoods

were his cathedral. The sky, birds, and wind were his prayers, the silence of the forest, his lover.

Everything drew him back to this mysterious something that was always and everywhere present, not only all around

him, but deep within.

He called this inner space, the point of pure nothingness at the center of all, the untouched

place of communion with the divine.

I find much relevance today in Burton's ideas on the spiritual journey,

where the outer world and the depths of the heart meet,

and where the sacred is discovered not elsewhere,

but here in the beauty of the living world,

and the mystery of earth.

And so this week we returned to On the Road with Thomas Merton, a profound essay by Fred Bonson,

who follows Merton's 1968 pilgrimage to the American West,

traveling to Redwood's monastery and Christ in the Desert Monastery Retracing the monk's path across the forest, shore, and desert,

seeking the same solitude and silence,

and guided by his contemplation,

Fred finds anew the ways God runs through both land and heart. Part 1. Woods

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