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.

How do inheritances shape our lives?

From the deeply personal, ancestral wisdom, or intergenerational trauma, to the collective, such as cultural norms,

or our ecological crisis. Such legacies bind us to a sense of identity. Our perception of

who we are, who we can be, is often profoundly shaped by stories that preceded our existence,

yet wove their way through our lives. And so, when navigating pain, loss, or ideas of the self,

when searching for a sense of autonomy, belonging,

a future better than the one promised to us.

What stories can we write to fill in what is missing, to change a

predictable ending, to carry us into spaces of healing and transformation? In this week's

narrated essay, Afrotayina author Jamie Figueroa brings her pen to the erase and fragmented pages

of her family's history,

exploring writing as a tool of revelation and reclamation amid the legacy of assimilation

into white colonialist culture. As she works to uncover the inherited wounds of her ancestors

housed in her own bodily cells, She also reaches for a deeper remembering,

riding her way into the landscapes and the cultural memories that bring pieces of her identity together.

This is my archive of silence.

The small lined notebook in my left hand is cumbersome.

My fingers grip the sides as best they can to steady the pages.

The pencil I use is dull.

...