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.

How do words shape our world?

What travels in the sound waves of speech or is embedded in the typography of text. What creative and destructive potential exists inside a word?

And what voices do we tend to listen to most?

Our language brims with stories, dreams, prophecies, ideas.

Some instinctive and primordial, others contrived and loaded with ambition.

Our words are active spaces, arenas to negotiate, pronounce, solidify what we believe to be true about ourselves.

And so when words leave a legacy of division between humans and a living world,

how might we begin to listen to the land to close this false

distance? What can we do to recall in spirit and matter, heart and language, that we are

not separate from the wilderness? In this week's narrated essay, writer Chelsea Steinhauer

Scudder visits the wind-sculpted dunes of Nebraska's

sandhills, considering the prophecies that collided across the American Great Plains in the 19th

century. Tracing the histories of violence, conquest, and degradation that have played out there,

Chelsea locates the points of which human and wilderness were separated.

Wondering what words, what prophetic voices are needed to guide us out of an entrenched dualism.

She calls us to remember that we have always been intimately connected

with the cycles of our ecosystems. Mountains Mountains

Mountains will always grate down to dust if you pull hard and long enough on the trailing thread of time.

I am standing atop one such was mountain.

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