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. This week, acclaimed poet Jake Skeets offers a denny

orientation to how seasonal moments invite us into an embodied participation with the cycles and rhythms of the earth.

Seasons are to the body what clouds are to the mountain.

We honor this relationship by leaping into time as an actual practice,

he writes,

evoking seasonal rituals of jumping into first snows to cleanse the body, stretching

at the arrival of spring storms, and the ways Dene language reflects an understanding of

body and land, as systems tied together.

Writing during an excessive heat warning, he traces summers on the Navajo Nation as physical

experience scored into memory

by the quality of light, wildfire smoke, and the heavy presence of heat, and asks what

becomes of a relationship to place, learn through the body, as those seasonal rhythms spin into extremes.

One, I'm writing this essay during an excessive heat warning.

I'm writing this essay during an excessive heat warning. For days the skies have been singed a hazy pale blue. Just the other day, I went for a walk in the evening and the

sunlight was pink as if a wildfire was burning nearby. We can recognize a wildfire by the way it slants the light.

I held my palm in the air and watched the light fall onto my skin in shades of rage and discontent.

I'm writing this essay during an excessive heat warning, and I have never been shy to heat.

I'm a boy born of desert.

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