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, Marine County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads

connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

We think a lot of emergence about the importance of learning to be with the grief that arises within

as we witness the destruction being wrought upon the earth. And I feel this grief, which really

holds the potential to open us to a renewed sense of relationship with the earth, is an echo of

the earth's own grief, for how much has been lost, and how deeply we have harmed the

living world.

And so when the absence of beauty and life on the earth hits the heart, breaking it open,

how can you hold and work with the grief that floods into that space?

What seeds of tenderness, of love, might grief leave in its wake?

This week, we revisit Thylacine, a short story by America novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist

Lydia Millett that imagines the twilight of the last remaining Tasmanian tiger, a creature caught in the crosshairs of

Australia's violent colonization. As a man mourns the death of his mother, he seeks the company

of the tiger housed in a failing zoo. Turning to face the loss that begins to swell through

the zoo like a plague, he summons the courage to care for what remains amid an overwhelming sorrow for what will

inevitably disappear.

Twice a day he could feel peaceful in the house when the tension of grieving ebbed from his body.

The muscles loosened, inside their sheaths of tissue, his bones seemed less heavy, shot through with the invisible air like the limbs of a bird. And then his mood

lifted, levitated by the magic of light. A sacred magic, he might have dared to call it,

...