Episodes

  • The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer

    The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer
    Dec 24 2024
    In this episode, we return to one of our most cherished stories: “The Serviceberry,” by Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. Exploring how we can move away from an economy of scarcity to one rooted in relationship and gratitude, she draws our attention to the gift economies flourishing all around us to affirm that it is entirely within our power to create webs of interdependence outside the market economy. When we find the courage to honor the gifts given by the living world, the outcome, she says, is not only material, but spiritual. Read the essay. Read the transcript for “Practical Reverence,” our interview with Robin on her latest book, which was inspired by this essay. Artwork by Studio Airport. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    49 mins
  • When the Prince of Heaven Sleeps – Roger Reeves

    When the Prince of Heaven Sleeps – Roger Reeves
    Dec 17 2024
    In a countermelody to the media’s persistent portrayal of Black bodies as working tirelessly, in constant motion, poet Roger Reeves centers images of Black men in postures of rest and repose. Evoking Muhammad Ali slumbering in a four-poster bed, John Coltrane washing dishes within the four walls of his house, DMX watering orchids, and Mike Tyson caring for his flock of pigeons, Roger reflects on the stillness and silence of their interior worlds as a protest against the control of capitalistic time. Read the essay. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Photo by Gordon Parks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    34 mins
  • Breath-Space and Seed-Time – David Hinton

    Breath-Space and Seed-Time – David Hinton
    Dec 10 2024
    In this narrated essay and six-poem sequence, acclaimed translator and poet David Hinton finds an uncannily literal translation of modern science’s “space-time” in yü chou—one of ancient China’s most foundational cosmological concepts. He invites us to contemplate the fabric of time and space as a kind of primordial breath, drawing on the ideograms for yü chou to show that time is not a metaphysical river moving past, but an all-encompassing present that renders the Cosmos alive. An epilogue of poems delivers us into an elemental world where time is woven with the sacred. Read the essay and poems. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Artwork by Studio Airport. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    16 mins
  • The World Is a Prism, Not a Window – A Conversation with with Zoë Schlanger

    The World Is a Prism, Not a Window – A Conversation with with Zoë Schlanger
    Dec 3 2024
    In this episode, climate journalist Zoë Schlanger speaks about her book The Light Eaters and explores what it might mean if we embraced plant intelligence within the frame of Western science. She shares a smorgasbord of new findings around the capabilities of plants—from roots that can sense the sound of running water to flowers memorizing the timing of pollinators’ visits—and wonders how a growing awareness of more-than-human intelligence can upend the structures and hierarchies we have placed around living beings, ourselves included. Talking about the politics of language in the field of botany, shedding her own plant blindness, and how we can widen our scientific imaginations to perceive intelligence in beings without brains, Zoë probes what it will take for us to let plants into the realm of our ethical consideration. Read the transcript. Photo by Yael Malka. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 mins
  • Practical Reverence – A Conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer

    Practical Reverence – A Conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer
    Nov 26 2024
    In this conversation, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer celebrates the serviceberry—both as a plant of joyous generosity, and as a living model for a gift economy that recognizes the sacred nature of the Earth. Delving into her latest book, which elaborates on an essay she wrote for us in 2020, Robin speaks about how a sense of “enoughness” can radically shift our habits of consumption; and how the ethical and pragmatic principles of the Honorable Harvest can invite us to honor a currency of relationship over a currency of money, helping us embody a practical reverence for the Earth and Her abundance. Read the transcript. Read Robin’s essay from 2020, “The Serviceberry.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr
  • Dendrochronology – Robert Moor

    Dendrochronology – Robert Moor
    Nov 19 2024
    In this narrated essay, writer Robert Moor journeys to Haida Gwaii, an island chain in British Columbia, for the anniversary of a historic agreement between the Haida Nation and the Canadian government that protects the landscape’s last remaining old-growth forests after decades of logging. As he walks through forest stewarded for generations by Haida, Robert begins to see the tangle of Sitka spruces and cedars, mosses and lichens, not as a site of slow decay, but of ongoing growth. How can being in the presence of ancient trees, he asks, help us feel, rather than intellectualize, not only the deep past, but also our responsibility to the future? Read the essay. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Artwork by Maurits Wouters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    34 mins
  • Wrinkled Time: The Persistence of Past Worlds on Earth – Marcia Bjornerud

    Wrinkled Time: The Persistence of Past Worlds on Earth – Marcia Bjornerud
    Nov 12 2024
    The Earth has a story that far precedes ours. Before we arrived on the scene, the Earth was already ancient beyond belief, shaped and reshaped by tectonic upheavals, climate changes, and mass extinctions—an evolution She has meticulously archived in the strata and sediment beneath our feet. In this narrated essay, author and geologist Marcia Bjornerud orients us to read these many-volume memoirs of our planet. Celebrating the deep time-fulness of Earth—the four billion years of dynamism that have made this moment possible—she wonders what might happen to our understanding of the past and the present if we remembered the stories that came before our humancentric one. Read the essay. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    34 mins
  • Unborn and Undying – Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

    Unborn and Undying – Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
    Nov 5 2024
    Our inner and outer worlds, while constantly changing, feed into each other, mirror each other, and both carry an imprint of what is eternal. In this narrated essay, author and Sufi mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee shows us how the sacred dimension of time, where the linear is absent, can lead us inwards to silence and emptiness; and outwards, towards a pure sensory awareness of the sights, sounds, and rhythms of the Earth. Sharing that time and timelessness “are not separate but part of a living structure that includes a mayfly that lives for a day and a thousand-year-old sequoia,” Llewellyn calls us to regain a relationship with time beyond numbers and schedules; to remember that time belongs to the deeper patterns of life. Read the essay. Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. Artwork by Laura Dutton. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    25 mins