Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Our podcast features in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads,

connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

In this episode, staff writer Chelsea Steinerauer-Skder narrates her essay, Wildfire Flatwater,

a journey through time and place in Nebraska and South Dakota.

Chelsea travels to the Great Plains to speak with people who are restoring the native prairie

and learning what it means to listen to the land.

From an ancient inland sea to the homesteading act of 1862 to the modern realities of industrial

agriculture, wildfire flatwater explores the long history and ongoing story of this land.

Fire.

Blue smoke twists and rises.

The fire snaps and hisses and crawls low across the ground,

roaring and huffing when it catches in a short-lived breeze. Blades of little blue stem bend and shrivel, curling into tiny black fists.

Flames press themselves against the trunks of the few cedar trees that hover like ghosts

in the smoky daylight, scattered among the grasses of the prairie.

With a sound like the inhale of some great beast, one of the cedars catches, fire snatches

the crown. The tree, moments ago, a silent, dark mass in a land of smoke, becomes a wild dance

of flame.

Prairie Ours is the language of wind sifting through grass.

We are sister to fire, brother to bison.

We move with the rising sun, turn with the earth.

...