Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Robert Buchfarlane is the author of the Old Ways,

the Wild Places, Mountains of the Mind, Landmarks,

the Lost Words, and most recently, Underland.

His work has been adapted for film and television,

and he is the recipient of the E.M. Foster Award for Literature and

the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow

of the University of Cambridge. I had a chance to sit down with Robert in April and talk

about his work and his lyrical relationship with language and landscapes. In our discussion of the half-seen things that

lurk in his newest book, Underland, the gathering of words for his acclaimed book, Landmarks,

and the summoning spells of the lost words, Robert explores how the precision of utterance,

a grammar of reciprocity, and an attentive practice of naming can summon wonder in our encounters with place.

It's a pleasure to be speaking with you today and getting a chance to explore your work and

this ongoing journey of the language of place that you have been developing

for many years.

And I guess my first question is really a sense of where this comes from inside of you,

because so much of your work focuses on this relationship to the place and the connection to the

landscapes, forests, waterways, pathways, and other natural spaces in your home in the

United Kingdom.

And it almost feels as if you're developing or sharing a language of place, a way of using

words that creates a real intimacy

...