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.

This week, as our journey into initiation continues, we receive an invitation to pass through a threshold.

Witnessing how humanity is tearing apart the web of life,

my father, Sufi teacher, and author Llewellyn Vaughn Lee,

calls us to return our awareness to a fully animate world

and to the deep ecology of consciousness we once held.

I like to walk early and I'm often alone on the beach, the ocean and the birds my only

companions, the tiny sandalings running back and forth chasing the waves.

Some days the sun rising over the headlands makes a pathway of golden light to the shore. Today the fog was dense and I could

just see two figures walking in the distance until they vanished into the mist, leaving a pair of

footprints in the sand until the incoming tide washed them away. It made me wonder what will remain in a hundred years when my

grandchildren's grandchildren are alive. Will the rising sea have covered the dunes? Climate

crisis will by then be a constant partner, and so many of today's dramas will be lost in a

vaster landscape of primal change.

Sensing this reshaping of the seashore, where the waves roll in from across the Pacific,

makes my mind stretch across horizons, how this land and our own lives have evolved.

One story of science says it was only 70,000 years ago that humans left Africa on their

long migrations across continents, arriving here on the Pacific coast just 13,000 years

ago, when the Bering Strait was dry land and not ocean, or possibly they came earlier

in boats down the coast.

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