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

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is the director of the medieval and early modern studies institute

at George Washington University, the author of Stone and Ecology of the Inhuman, and co-author

of Earth.

In his essay, The Pull of the Sky, Jeffrey journeys through both time and

space, tracing historical and contemporary perspectives of the Earth as it has been viewed from above.

From medieval manuscripts to the first images of the Earth captured from space, he explores

how, for thousands of years humans

have imagined what it would mean to see our planet from celestial heights, raising

the question of how to reconcile our bounded lives with our longing for the cosmos.

For thousands of years, humans have imagined what it would mean to view the Earth from celestial heights,

raising the question of how to reconcile our bounded lives with our longing for the cosmos.

Sometimes even writers who dwell too much on earthbound things fill a celestial

pull in an invitation to a loftier perspective. The irascible medieval writer Gerald of Wales,

for example, spent much of his life being disappointed by people and institutions. In numerous

texts he composed in the 12th and 13 centuries,

Gerald vented his anger at various groups to which he did not and could not belong.

He is famous for describing ways to conquer lands whose residents would rather have been left alone.

He felt an early calling for the study of divinity.

As a child, Gerald built cathedrals rather than castles out of sand.

Earthly life was for him unquestionably the gift of a deity, active in a world that he had fashioned and loves.

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