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.

Marie Mockett was born and raised in California to a Japanese mother and an American father.

Her books include American Harvest, God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland,

Where the Dead Paws and the Japanese Say Goodbye, and picking bones from ash.

In this piece, Marie considers the stories that could help us change our relationship to nature

in the face of repeated natural disasters.

In doing so, she revisits the wisdom embedded in the story of Onomazu,

the giant catfish that is said to live beneath her mother's homeland of Japan.

We did not think of September as the start of fire season, but as a kind of second summer,

a period of prolonged good weather by which was meant no rain. Even when we had

returned to school, we could count on sunbathing, hiking, and going to the beach on weekends.

This weather might last through December, and it was a thing in coastal California that we were

sure made us special as Californians.

The first big California fire, I remember, was in June of 2008. A few weeks after my father died in a

hospital, I woke up one morning and watched Ash rain down and gather in the grooves of the brick patio.

I had never seen falling ash before. How poetic I thought at the time. The world was mirroring my grief.

A meeting I'd scheduled with the estate lawyer later that week was postponed because he was

busy trying to save his home in Big Sur, which was in an evacuation zone.

The house burned.

That was only 13 years ago.

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