Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. and spirituality. Ailey Baker is a writer with a background in radio, public folklore, and environmental history.

In her essay, wave patterns, based on her experience sailing with a master, traditional navigator,

Ailey explores one of the oldest technologies and how we can remember our innate ability to orient ourselves in a shifting world.

Before modern technology, we were all moved by nature.

In traditional navigation, the canoe sits at the heart of the world,

and the navigator sits at the very center, quietly observing the shifting skies and seas from a place

of stillness.

I grew up dreaming of the open ocean.

The year before I was born, my parents left their home in Scotland and crossed the Atlantic

on a small sailboat. It took them 22 days, 22 days of open horizon, no ships, a few squalls,

and a basket of avocados that ripened all at once. In my mind's eye, my dad is at the mass with his sextant, calling out numbers as he balances

himself amidst the waves to sight glowing planets and stars.

And then there was my mother, her eyes flicking back and forth between the distant horizon

and the compass before her, one hand coaxing the tiller, the other carefully jotting down

positions in the diary she keeps of their crossing. As they neared the Caribbean, the ocean changed.

The long, lilting swells that had passed beneath them days before began to reflect back from a shoreline

that was not yet visible. The surface grew choppy and uneven until one morning a rogue wave

rushed over the stern of their boat, washing into the cockpit and nearly swamping their craft.

Whenever my mother comes to this place in their story, I shiver. As the wave rises, I tremble,

...