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 Mewalk 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.

It's deeply human to long for stability and continuity, and we are often fearful of what might be lost amid tides of change.

Yet the earth tells us in many languages,

erosion, wildfire, ice melt, compost, the seasons,

that nothing lasts.

All is fleeting in an endless cycle of creation and destruction.

In this week's episode, writer Erica Berry grapples with her fear

over how destructive wildfire in Montana

and the long overdue Cascadia earthquake in the Pacific Northwest

could change these landscapes beyond her recognition.

As she tries to find ways to be with this uncertainty,

she works at the edges of her inability to visualize time

beyond the span of personal and settle her colonial memories,

seeing how this blinds her from the Earth's constant flux.

In this space, detaching from her ideas of stable landscapes,

she finds that impermanence doesn't always signal loss,

but rather transformation of form.

And she begins to hold the multiplicity of the lands she loves. The first time I hiked the hill after the burn, the checkerboard of charred earth behind my grandparents' house left sandpaper in my throat.

The ponderosa pines were spindly and metallic as if flame had turned their bark to stone. Some treetops were still green, which was good, my grandmother told me. It meant there was still

life in them. Those were the ones likely to survive. Back then I was in my early 20s, molting my teenage invincibility had left me raw,

...