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.

If you've never read a poem by Jane Hirschfield, I really encourage you to do so.

For me, her work opens one's eyes and heart to what lies at the periphery,

what is both ordinary and invisible amid the clamor of modern life.

She draws attention to things we are not often collectively attentive to

and reorients us to engage from a space of wonder and awe.

She calls this process, giving something otherwise unholdable, a holdable shape,

which I love.

Her work is both mystical and deeply rooted in physical life,

and lays bare the kinship between all things,

and how illusory the separation between the self and the world is.

Rather than shying away from the unknowable mystery of existence,

she brings us into relationship with it and locates us as part of its fabric.

And so it's a great privilege to be joining her in conversation.

She wrote a wonderful poem for our latest print edition, entitled Time Thinks of Time,

and we talk about the genesis of this poem, and how Jane's own experience of time has changed throughout her life,

from being shaped by her Zen practice and tastes of timelessness in meditation,

to finding a sense of intimacy with time through

...