Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk 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.

What does it mean to know a landscape on terms that are not just our own?

To open our senses to the ways the Earth holds and share

stories through her many forms and permutations. In this week's narrated essay, author

Jenny O'Dell considers the language of geology spoken by the land, bringing us into the wrinkled

terrain of her Oakland neighborhood. Learning to listen to the land, bringing us into the wrinkled terrain of her Oakland neighborhood.

Learning to listen to the creek, the canyon, the incline, and the gulch as a conversation

between time, water, and rock.

Jenny searches for the memories and stories held in the shape of the landscape around

her. As she practices walking and seeing with a new quality of attention,

Jenny goes beyond the many human-centric meanings superimpose on her home place,

reaching into the larger narrative of deep geological time that she lives within.

If you were to ask me where I live, my answer would depend on where we are.

If we are not in my city of residence, I might say Oakland.

If we are in Oakland, I might say Grand Lake.

And if we're in Grand Lake, I might say near the Rose Garden.

But none of those really express where I feel myself to live,

which is in a giant wrinkle, just one of many in a generally wrinkly area.

...