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 Marin County.

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

The world we experience comes into being through perception.

It shaped as much by imagination, memory, and cultural meanings, as by rock, water, and soil.

To truly see a landscape, then, is to engage not only with what meets the eye, but with what can be perceived with the inner senses.

It is to engage not just with matter, but with the metaphysical.

In this week's story, Strange New World, Roy Scranton shows us how moving beyond our habitual

ways of seeing reveals the depth present even within the most ordinary of landscapes.

What first appears to him as an uninspiring farmland and industrial sprawl in his new home in

South Bend, Indiana, begins, under close attention, to disclose an archive of dramatic glacial

shifts, flourishing indigenous societies, and the havoc wrought by European colonization.

As he uncovers the land's geological,

ecological, and cultural layers,

the Midwestern flatness unfolds into a rich terrain

with both physical and temporal meaning.

Roy invites us to practice this same attentiveness,

to weave a place as many meanings

into our most fundamental experience of it.

In doing so, landscapes we deem mundane become strange to us, and so once again become vital and alive. For Jeff for Jeff.

One.

...