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. Around this time last year, I interviewed the writer

David James Duncan. I'd spent the winter reading his latest book, Sun House, and was so deeply

moved by it, I told nearly everyone I know to read it too. As things darken day by day here in the

U.S., the perspective held in Sunhouse feels ever more relevant. For a little context, it follows the journeys of an eclectic collection

of characters, each seeking truth and meaning, who ultimately come together to form an unintentional

community in rural Montana. It's a story that takes us into how a heart can be broken open

and transformed by the beauty of the natural world and deep mystical

experiences. But most strikingly to me, it imagines a tangible embodied experience of the shifting

consciousness we so desperately need right now as we try to navigate our way out of the social, political,

and ecological crises we've ignited.

It offers a story of what it means to search for transcendence in a world going completely

out of balance.

In this conversation, David talks about the impetus behind the story to impart a kind

of experiential model of contemplative inner life

that could help root us through a future of immense unraveling.

And we also speak of the mystics, from Zen master Dojan to the 13th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart

and the Beguines that have both shaped the book

and his own spiritual life. And what different futures might become possible if we opened our

...