Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

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

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

Thank you. culture, and spirituality. The poet W.S. Merwin spent the last four decades of his life on Maui,

restoring a plot of abandoned land into one of the most diverse and expansive palm tree gardens in the world.

In this essay,

staff writer Chelsea Steiner-Skutter

visits these lush 19 acres,

now home to more than 3,000 palm trees

and more than 400 unique species.

Merwin wrote poetry in the morning

and spent his afternoons planting and tending to trees.

His poems are a living witness to the care he offered to this land.

I want to tell what the forests were like.

I will have to speak in a forgotten language.

W. S. Merwin, Witness

In 1976, when William Stanley Merwin first visited a three-acre property for sale on the north shore of Maui,

he did not yet know its recent history. In the early 19th century, it had been extensively logged

to provide lumber for whaling ships. After much of the forest was gone, cattle were put out to graze. The water of the stream

that once flowed down among the trees had been diverted to the agricultural fields in the center

of the island. Most recently, a pineapple plantation had been started and then failed some years later,

after the farmers plowed the land vertically, up and down the slope instead of across it,

...