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 Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Our sixth print edition, coming out next month, explores the seasons and how they offer a primary gateway into the ongoing cycle of creation, renewal,

growth, decay, and death. The underpins our world. This volume moves through three themes,

requiem, invitation, and celebration, each contemplating the paradoxical ways the seasons are changing beyond recognition, yet still

beckoning us into an intimate relationship with the Earth.

As an introduction to the themes exploring this volume, I wanted to share a series of talks

over the next few weeks that I gave back in May at an emergence retreat at the

Whippee Institute.

This first talk looks at the cyclical nature of the seasons and how they mirror the sacred

nature of existence.

These seasonal cycles are all unique and deeply specific to place.

Whether it's the bud and bloom of a blossom, the turning and falling of leaves,

or the transformation of water as it freezes and melts.

And when we devote our attention to these cycles over time, their continuous variation reveals itself,

unfurling like a spiral that draws us deeper into kinship with place and with the earth.

But today, instead of recognizing the ways we are connected with the seasons,

we distance ourselves from our cycles, thinking we are impervious to them.

But despite this, a primordial way of being in relationship with the seasons

remains hidden inside of us, like a memory waiting to surface. If we can find the courage to engage

...