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.

We have long been warned about anthropomorphizing non-human beings, of projecting human qualities where there are none to be found.

But what dangers lie in forgetting our animality?

Identified with our own technological prowess and our capacity for subduing nature,

we don't associate ourselves with being animal.

But our bodies, our instincts, our desire to nurture and be embedded within the living world

betray a different story, that we are and always have been deeply animal.

How can remembering this essence of our being help us survive, help us protect what is sacred amid the uncertainty of our time.

In this week's story, Northern Irish author Carrie Niedekirte,

feels her way through an emerging realization of her mammalhood.

As her understanding of home, food, land, and safety are transformed by her journey into motherhood.

Carrie encounters her own animal self, as deeply interconnected with the ecosystems around her.

Listening for teachings from the earth, she leans into the ancient and wild part of herself

as she navigates raising a child in a burning and breaking world.

In the second trimester of my first pregnancy,

I began to experience my body in the world

in ways that unsettled me beyond comprehension.

Only in the summer just passed, two whole years later,

did I begin to try to unravel those feelings.

That last sentence is erroneous, in fact.

...