Podcast

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.

How can we put our emerging knowledge around forest systems into practice? In this episode, renowned forest ecologist Suzanne Simard returns to the podcast to talk about her latest book, When the Forest Breathes, and her decades-long Mother Tree Project, which integrates Western science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge to reshape our forest harvesting methods in ways that protect the integrity of both their ecosystems and our climate futures. As she shares her team’s landmark findings on what Mother Trees are telling us about generational resilience, Suzanne challenges us to begin working with the intelligence of the forest.

This special episode features the audio edition of our new pocket book, Song of the Seasons, by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, which offers a meditation on how the sacred nature of the seasons reveals itself to us in every moment and asks us to respond from a place of gratitude and humility. Like the book, this audio version is meant to be listened to outside, amid the Earth’s cycles of birth, growth, decay, and death, accompanying you as you seek a deeper engagement with the seasons.

Discover the print edition of Song of the Seasons.

This week, biologist David George Haskell brings us into the tangled histories and biological rhythms of four wildflowers that grow around his home in Atlanta, Georgia, revealing how each is rooted within webs of innovative, reciprocal relationships between hummingbirds, puddles, bee tongues, and human hands. Tracing how these heralds of spring have adapted to new climate conditions and new neighbors, he invites us to seek the stories of the flowers where we live to ground ourselves in the shifting realities shaping us too.

This week, Irish author Kerri ní Dochartaigh offers an evocation on how we might hold the duality of lightness and darkness in a world increasingly divided. When fear and loss are pervasive, how do we engage with the life that remains? Can we see experiences of grief as invitations into feeling our relationality with all living things? Tracing how a childhood in Derry in the northwest of Ireland taught her to tend the delicate, often invisible threads that bind us to each other, she brings us into the Celtic celebration of Bealtaine, which marks the transition towards the brightness of summer, to reveal how Earth’s cycles of light and dark are a dance of which we are a part.

In this second episode of our seasons conversation series, Volume 6 contributors David G. Haskell and Dara McAnulty explore how our senses shape myriad experiences of the seasons, some collective and some deeply personal. Finding wonder in the symbolism of daffodils in spring, carnivals of pollen-dusted black bees, and the feeling of joy tinged with grief as familiar seasonal moments return each year altered, David and Dara invite us to open our eyes, ears, and hearts to the celebration that lives within the seasons.

This week, Diné poet Jake Skeets brings us into the rising dust, big sky, and bent light of summers on the Navajo Nation, and explores how the body is not separate from the seasons, rather one of the many terrains upon which they play out. Now living amid excessive heat warnings, sandstorms, and wildfire haze that test his love of the summer, Jake asks how such extremes will reshape our intimate and ancestral relationship with the seasons.

For Christian mystic Thomas Merton, the sacred and the profane were continuous: all was alive with divine presence. Stands of redwoods were his cathedral, the sky, birds, and wind were his prayers, and the silence of the forest his lover. This week, we return to an essay by Fred Bahnson, who follows Merton’s 1968 pilgrimage to the American West as he travels to Redwoods Monastery and Christ in the Desert Monastery. Guided by Merton’s contemplation and seeking the same solitude, Fred discovers anew the ways God runs through both land and heart.

Watch the companion film by Jeremy Seifert.

Can we learn from more-than-human beings how to bring our bodies into a more direct conversation with the seasons? In this week’s story, bioethics and history researcher Melanie Challenger explores how our culture insulates us from experiencing seasonal signals in the natural world, ultimately impeding our ability to respond to ecological change. Examining how animals and plants translate important shifts in the land into meaningful activity, Melanie reflects on what it would take for humans to reawaken the same attunement to the changes, great and small, unfolding around us.

This week, author and poet CMarie Fuhrman listens to the forest speak its old stories through the roll of thunder, the river emptied of salmon, and the howl of wolves in Idaho’s remote Frank Church Wilderness. In these sounds and silences, she remembers the people and knowledge that colonial history has tried to erase. Recognizing herself as a “person of ground,” she contemplates the past as something that we can call forth into the present, and memory as moving in the opposite direction of prayer—down into the Earth.