Emergence Magazine Podcast

Our series of Remembering Earth audio practices begins with an episode all about breath. We share breath with plants, trees, oceans, and animals. It is the great connector, bringing us into a cycle of reciprocity with the more-than-human world. Across spiritual traditions, breath practices are often seen as a technology that bridges spirit and matter, helping us move beyond the mind into a more porous state of being. In three practices that build upon one another—Awareness of the Moment, Breathing from Our Essence, and Shared Breath—attend to one of our most simple exchanges with the Earth.
Discover Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology.

When we are broken open by grief and love at the immense loss we are witnessing, the memory of a primordial bond with the Earth can awaken within our heart. Listen to this excerpt from Remembering Earth, a new book by Emergence founder and Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, which explores how our moment of ecological and cultural crisis serves as a crucible for collective transformation.
Read “Chapter One: A Primordial Covenant of Relationship”
Discover Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology
Credit © Yael Martinez / Magnum Photos

How might our decision-making systems work differently if they were adapted to receive input from the more-than-human world? In this archive story, writer and ethicist Melanie Challenger examines the staggering expressive capacities of Earth's creatures, from the subtle vocalizations of turtles to the freckling of Humboldt squid. She urges us to act less as intermediaries and more as deep listeners to the voices around us. Pushing the idea further, she asks how we can expand our democratic processes to make room for the lives and interests of our animal kin.
Read the essay.
Photo by Annie Marie Musselman

Reciting an excerpt from his poem, “Fifty-Eight Faces of California Spring,” Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and translator Forrest Gander travels through California’s many counties to offer a geologic atlas of this vast region in spring. Speaking the language of rock—alluvium, quartzite, sandstone, jasper—these field notes give a glimpse of the cycles that continually play out amid apparent stillness, the always-present change hidden in the swathe of deep time.
Read the full poem.
Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.
Credit: Ryan Molnar / Connected Archives

In this intimate conversation, Terry Tempest Williams contemplates what spiritual life looks like in a burning world. How do we respond to what the Earth is calling us to dream into being? How do we bring this and the destructive mentality of our time together in prayer? Sharing her ongoing work of attending to “the Glorians”—visitations that fuse our attention with the wild mystery around us—she explores how they can help our hearts expand to hold the paradoxes of our moment.
Read the transcript.
Photo by Barb Kinney