Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

As we consider how to walk into possible futures, we are taking a moment this week to look inward.

Alexis Wright is an Australian Aboriginal author,

a member of the Wangei people from the Southern Gulf of Carpentaria.

In this essay, as the world falters,

threatening native ecosystems and indigenous lifeways,

Alexis turns inward at the dwelling place of ancestral story.

A Buddhist monk and Zen poet, whose name was Yu Ning, once wrote Agatha, or poem over a thousand years ago, the poem titled There Was No Tree to the Buddha, was essentially about how the purity of enlightenment

would not be corrupted by the dust particles of life. The four-line poem ends with the line,

when then was the dust. At the turn of the century, I began thinking about how the essential

truths of my people, how within our lands and within the knowledge of the century, I began thinking about how the essential truths of my people, how

within our lands and within the knowledge of country, have endured great storms of dust,

cultural oppression, droughts, fire, and two questions arose, how far would we as Aboriginal

people go to survive? What is the future of the planet?

I ended up writing this one book, a novel that imagines an apocalyptic future and

chose how Aboriginal people are tied through globalisation to the inequalities and suffering

experienced by millions of others across the planet.

I could not foresee the global pandemic emergency taking place now,

or how this would link all of humanity in a global tragedy

and an urgent worldwide fight for our survival.

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