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.

Two weeks ago, the fourth film in our Shifting Landscapes documentary film series, Tase of the Land,

premiered on Emergence.

It's a capstone to our summer exploration of how story and its many forms, song, poetry,

myth, and film, can bring us into embodied connection with the land,

even when ecological destruction and loss is changing its very face.

This final film in the series shares the story of Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyani Mams search for a spiritual relationship with her homeland, after the Khmer Rouge displaced

her family, severing her sense of self from the land and ancestral wisdom that she belonged to.

We're sharing a companion essay to the film by Kalyani.

She takes us deeper into the meaning of Chit, the Khmer word for taste,

and how this informs the language for land and country,

as well as the idea that to truly know the essence of the land,

one must know its taste.

Tracing her life back to its very beginnings,

the burying of her placenta into the soil of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge,

and her family's journey through a mountain range laden with landmines.

She contemplates what was stripped and stolen from her family,

and what essential connection remained.

She shares her first land taste,

...