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.

Anna Bagkin is a writer and essayist, who has written about a dozen wars on three continents and has spent

most of her life in the global south.

Her books include Fisherman's Blues, a West African community at sea, and walking with

Abel journeys with the nomads of the African Savannah.

In this essay, Anna embarks on a week-long journey across the Sahara Desert, tracing the ancient

route that pilgrims once caravan from the Atlantic coast to Mecca.

Along the way, she contemplates human movement across shifting landscapes, the impermanence

of memory, and what remains internal

in the face of erasure.

Later, we will slow down to walking speed. A day of dunes, a day of black lava pavement, a day of maroon

pebbles. But on our first day in the Sahara, Sid Ahmed in the lead truck smooth talks us past

checkpoints and we drive through the desert fast on a good road. An hour of pale dunes, an hour of sunburnt grass, low on white, and old man's stubble.

An hour of dust storm. Oasis's perimeter, 10,000 gallon pillow tanks for water laid out like

waterbeds for the giants who must roam this vastness. Every hour or so, small, perfect cubes of single-room

homes, clean and pastel, peep out of sand the color of the skin on the heel of your palm,

that spot where the lines of life and fate close in, and newborn neatness about them.

They stand alone or in clusters, each a concrete replica of a Bedou tent with a pyramidal

roof that aims an iron spike at the sky, a scattering of draodles, each pinned up

beseechingly to heaven, as if to keep them from flying away, or to allow

...