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.

Our Earth, ancient and fragile, has an immense capacity for archiving the course of history.

In addition to holding ecological memories in rocks, trees, ice, and pollen,

landscapes are dynamic and active tablets upon which human and non-human stories are continuously

inscribed. And in the unforgiving context of a drastically changing climate, the lingering

legacies and shadowy silhouettes of

existences past are surfacing to remind us that there are certain stories that cannot be erased.

Certain gestures, violent and reverent, that the land remembers. In this week's story, acclaimed

author Anna Bachin contemplates markings both literal and

metaphorical that have been set into the earth by millennia of creaturely presence. While researching,

she mistakenly reads ecological potholes as ecological portholes and is drawn into a curious search for the threads of meaning

that characterize the imprints we leave in our wake. As she brings her attention to the Buffalo Wallows

of North America, the game Cretekei she played as a child, and the surfacing contours of ancient monuments in the British

aisles, as well as the networks of memory, identity, and prophecy bound up in each. She wonders

what our lineage of impressions on a ravaged earth might foretell for the future.

In the account of his travels in North America

from 1527 until 1536,

...