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.

Discover Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology

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.

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.

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.

This week’s episode features two stories that show how languages tied to land can transcend the duality between our inner and outer worlds. In “Five Hundred Words,” Marie Mutuski Mockett considers what may become of the timeless tradition of haiku, nurtured over generations, when the seasonal words it relies on no longer reflect our ecological reality. The second story is an excerpt from the book Thirty-Two Words for Field, by the late Manchán Magan, that invites us into landscapes known intimately through the Irish language. Narrated by Manchán’s brother, Ruán, this excerpt is layered with folklore, proverbs, and cultural memory.

Read Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Read Manchán Magan

With his signature joy, Irish author and naturalist Dara McAnulty praises the arrival of curlew song in spring, emerging emperor dragonflies, feet crunching on fallen leaves, and the sweeping flight of a barn owl on a midsummer evening. This ode to experiencing the seasons as a natural flowing of one’s being—rather than a backdrop of abstract phenomena—shows us how when the body is in relation with the land, our sense of self can soften back into belonging with Earth.

When we increasingly turn to AI to produce written work with just the click of a button, we risk not only eroding our capacity to imagine and give form to ideas, but we also strip writing of the mysterious process that makes it alive and meaningful. This week, Stephanie Krzywonos explores how the age-old labor of writing has always been a profoundly embodied act, and considers how all our creations, whether impressed in clay or typed on a computer, are microcosms of Earth’s own generativity. As AI increasingly does work for us, she wonders if we are closing ourselves off from the intelligence of the Earth.

In 2022, during a field trip to Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador, mycologist Giuliana Furci, author Robert Macfarlane, legal scholar and More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, and musician Cosmo Sheldrake wrote and recorded “Song of the Cedars”: a composition made not just in the forest, but in conscious collaboration with it. This week, we return to a conversation between them that explores their time in the forest and their ongoing efforts to secure legal recognition for its role in creating the song. Interspersed with the track’s polyphony—toucan calls, cicada strings, and leaf chatter woven with human voices—this conversation invites you to listen to what true creative reciprocity with the Earth can sound like.

If the very act of seeing distances us from the living world, how can ancient modes of seeing and being help us navigate our era of disconnection? This week we return to our conversation with poet, translator, and author David Hinton as part of our exploration of the seasons. Drawing on Taoist and Ch’an Buddhist philosophies, David reveals how offering attention to the beauty of simple moments, like birdsong and blossom-fall, can bring us into a particular quality of awareness; and how the cycles of absence and presence in the seasons are mirrored by the cycles of form and emptiness in our own inner worlds.