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. For many of us today, we experience the season through abstractions,

calendars and dates, festivals and rituals, whose meanings we've forgotten.

And we buffer ourselves from their sensory reality through technologies that give us climate control,

a year-round availability of seasonal fruit, and artificial lighting.

The seasons have become an optional idea rather than an essential immersive experience

of the earth. To borrow a phrase from the great geologian Thomas Berry, we've broken the great

conversation that we once had with the seasons. In this week's story, researcher and writer on

environmental history, bioethics, and philosophy of science, Melanie Challenger,

explores how we have detached our bodies from a direct knowledge of the seasons,

and in doing so, severed our ability to respond intuitively the change is great and small.

Paying attention to the animals, coots, spiders, honeybees, at seemingly

know when spring is about to begin and respond accordingly with simple embodied

action, Melanie reflects on what it would take for humans to reawaken that

same attunement in an era where seasons no longer arrive on time.

It is late February, several weeks from springtime, and my body is being rocked gently inside a narrow boat on the river Cam.

The yellow curtains are drawn, thick and textured like layers of pressed pollen.

I'm only half awake.

My husband is sleeping fitfully beside me on the three-quarters

...