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.

This month, we're releasing the first of our new four-part shifting landscapes documentary film series, exploring the role of art

and the storyteller in our age of ecological crisis.

The first film, The Nightingale Song, was inspired by my conversation for the podcast back

in 2021 with the British folk singer and conservationist Sam Lee, who each spring spends his nights singing with the nightingales

in the forests of southern England.

The voices of nightingales have lit up these forests every spring for over a million years,

inspiring generations of writers, artists, and musicians.

But as the climate changes and development impacts the birds wintering and nesting grounds,

they may very well disappear from the UK within the next 50 years.

In the film, we spend time with Sam during Nightingale season, as he joins this elusive

bird and spontaneous mutual song.

Re-entwining human voices with the creative virtuosity of the Nightingale, Sam conjures

a deepening relationship of care, stewardship, and love with these remarkable creatures

and the living world we share.

As a companion to the film's release, we're resharing my original conversation with Sam,

where he shares the story of how the call of the Nightingale opened him to a kinship with the

more than human, and talks about how the beauty and magic of the Nightingale song might

offer both the birds a path back towards our cultural consciousness and humans a gateway into

re-enchantment with the earth.

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