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.

Caught in a maelstrom of ecological and social disintegration,

fraying stories and perishing dreams,

we find much of the world as we know it is inching towards

the precipice of collapse. History shows us that the epilogues of eras are often rife with

turmoil and hardship. And as we enter the twilight of our civilization, we become tasked with

navigating devastation, with learning how to be amid darkness.

What practices of tenderness and surrender can ground us in the thick of chaos?

What stories can light our way through?

How can we weather the storms that await us?

This week, we share a short story by Japanese fiction author Masetsugo Ono that invites us to sink

into a landscape beset by darkness.

In The Place by the Sea, translated and narrated by Sam Melissa, a newly arrived woman

and her young son encountered the mysterious

remaining residence of an abandoned village on the eastern coast of Japan, where a typhoon

stirs at the distance.

As the borders between reality, memory, and illusion begin to blur, the woman finds herself

increasingly inseparable from this tormented place.

I remember passing through one tunnel after another, but there were no lights in the tunnels,

...