Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. culture and spirituality. Emma Maris is a writer based in Klamath Falls, Oregon.

She is the author of Rambunctious Garden,

an exploration of how conservation is changing in the Anthropocene.

In this essay, Emma ventures into the dark realm of the soil,

the primordial source of life and decay, fertility and death.

From the muses of ancient Greece to the compost pile in her backyard garden,

she explores humanity's ancient relationship with that which is both womb and tomb.

The goddess of Ruru, she washed her hands, took a pinch of clay, threw down in the wild.

In the wild, she created Enkidu, the hero, offspring of silence, knit strong by Ninurta,

from the epic of Gilgamesh.

Invocation of the Muse

I walk out of my house into my backyard, grab a stick, and dig at a patch of bare earth near my compost bin.

I fill my hands, bring the soil to my nose, and inhale.

Much of what I smell is geosmin, from the Greek Yeo, earth, and osmi, smell,

a compound produced by soil-dwelling microbes called actinobacteria. It's the smell of fresh,

fluffy compost, or well-tended garden soil, that musky, metallic, fresh blood

and old leaves smell of beets and potatoes and root cellars. The smell of fertility, possibility.

Humans are attuned to the smell. We can recognize it at concentrations below 10 parts per trillion.

When rain falls on dry soil, it is kicked up into the air as a component of the electrifying scent known as Petrachor,

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