Welcome to the Emergence Magazine podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee,

host of this show recorded on the unseated lands of the Coast Mewak peoples in present-day Marin County.

In each episode, we explore the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality,

with the world's leading ecological thinkers, writers, poets, and spirituality, with the world's leading ecological thinkers, writers,

poets, and storytellers, through in-depth conversations, author-narrated essays, poetry,

and nature connection practices.

This week's story, a thread of belonging by Irish author and naturalist Dara McAnulty, really encapsulates the heart of the theme of celebration that we've been exploring

as part of our journey into the seasons. True to Dara's signature joy,

it offers an ode to the seasonal moments and memories

that bring him into intimate relationship with the land.

From the spring arrival of Kirluz to the sweeping flight of a barn owl

on a midsummer evening.

For Dara, the seasons are not just abstract phenomena occurring out there, but rather

something profoundly felt, shaping how he knows the world, as he writes a beat that aligns him

to the wonder of the earth. Letting seasonal experiences be the sinew that bind him in a sense of belonging to whatever place he is in.

Whether it be his home in Northern Ireland, along the riverbanks of Cambridge,

or the rainforests of Borneo increasingly threatened by deforestation,

Dara shows us what a simple praise of the beauty and wonder of the seasons can look like.

We were saying goodbye to another year of the hardest and most intense work,

making a celebratory circle on the fast-becoming brittle June grass.

Cambridge, even in early summer, is too hot for my temperate Irish bones.

...