Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk 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. The turning round of the seasons, year after year, is so profoundly

familiar that we rarely give a second thought to its origin.

This cycle, and all the ways it expresses itself across our landscapes, simply is.

But the diminishing stability of the seasons raises the suggestion that their rhythms

might one day end, which prompts the question, how did they begin?

In this week's episode, biologist and writer Brian Isett introduces us to Thea, the proto planet that collided with Earth four and a half billion years ago, creating the moon,

tilting Earth on her axis, and ultimately giving rise of the rhythms and cycles

that shape our lives, days, tides, months, and seasons. Brian reflects on how we've largely

forgotten Earth's history with these two celestial bodies, insulating ourselves not only from

the seasonal rhythms born of these relationships,

but from the changes now erasing them. He wonders how we will meet a world in which children

ask questions like, what was it like to have winter, and whether, in our response, we will

remember the rhythms Thea set in motion and that held us for generations.

There was one star bigger than the rest in the night sky, almost a moon,

and one day it loosened from its fixture in that black expanse, overcome with an urge to wander.

Over successive nights, it grew larger and larger as it traveled close. It wobbled as it approached, appearing to stumble through unfamiliar

constellations. On the final night, a glowing red planet filled the sky. A wall of molten rock

lifted on the horizon as the earth itself

...