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, Marine County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

For me, part of our story of separation from the earth is rooted in our forgetfulness of the season's ever-growing cycles of birth, growth, decay, and death.

Yet the seasons still call to us every day through myriad expressions.

Can we remember how to listen?

This week on the podcast, we're sharing the audio version of a new little limited edition book we've just

published called Song of the Seasons. It's an adaptation of several talks I gave at the

Whippey Institute last spring, and at its essence offers a simple meditation on how the sacred

nature of the seasons reveals itself to us every day, in every moment.

I write about how the seasons are a doorway through which we can once again recognize the earth as animate and alive,

and how we might respond from a place of gratitude and humility.

And perhaps most importantly, I explore how the simple intimacy that emerges when we offer

our attention to the thousand seasonal moments brings us into an embodied relationship with

the landscapes we call home.

As with the book, this audio version is designed to be taken outside and listened to in

the midst of the living world cycles of birth, growth, decay and death,

and the beauty and grief within them, with the hope that it can serve as a simple invitation and companion as you seek a deeper engagement with the seasons.

Adapted from three talks given at the Whippy Institute in May 2025.

This text is a meditation on the nature of the seasons,

how they hold us, how they remind us of our place within the living earth,

...