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.

A question we return to a lot at emergence, and one I'm sure many of you contemplate as you witness the fallout of our forgotten sacred relationship

with the living world, is how we might actively foster a remembrance of our connection

with the earth. What can we do to summon a more profound sense of interconnectivity, of kinship

that might ultimately lead us towards caring for and honoring

her once again as a sacred being.

These are important questions, and responses to them are often complex and ambitious.

A couple of episodes back, we shared a conversation exploring where translations of whale language might lead us,

and how this could change or deepen our relationship with whales.

But what if nurturing a relationship with the more than human can also be as simple as recognizing

with the inner and outer senses, the ways we are bound in connection.

In this essay, poet and author Sophie Strand uses her imagination to feel herself as part of the

more than human, as river, as hummingbird, as the blood of a monarch butterfly, but mostly

as part of the endless mycelial network beneath her feet. She opens herself up to what she calls

a supricellular state, where her mind can pass through threads of relation into the more than human.

There in the non-binaryness of fungi, the standard conception of the self is confounded,

and she is free to leak beyond the bounds of individual consciousness, to experience being,

not as a siloed self, but as a web of interconnectivity.

What empathy might flourish, she asks, when we practice a thinking like this,

...