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.

Anna Badkin brings us into histories of imperial collapse as we continue our exploration of the theme of ashes

and what it means to live in a moment of unraveling.

How do we come to terms with the world we have made, she asks,

and how do we make space for hope and sanctuary?

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.

No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, no sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

Cheslov Milosh

Jurbel is an oasis in arid scrub brush,

about a hundred miles inland from Senegal's Atlantic coast.

Here, a century ago,

the eschatic pacifist preacher Sheikh Ahmadu Bamba spent the last 15 years

of his life under house arrest for advocating nonviolent opposition to the French colonial occupation

of West Africa. Today, Bamba is revered as a saint and a hero of anti-colonial resistance, and the small

slat shack to which he was confined is encased within a windowed marble shrine that stands roughly

in the center of a massive sandy compound, which itself is surrounded by a tall, white wall. You take off your shoes at the main gate,

as you would entering a home or the courtyard of a mosque. You pass through other, smaller gates

in a succession of tin walls that partition the compound into smaller sandy sections, each quieter than the last.

Then you reach it, the shrine, and through a window you can see the saint's house, can see inside

...