Making the Invisible Visible – A Conversation with Marshmallow Laser Feast’s creative director Ersin Han Ersin

This month we released the first film in our new four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series exploring the role of art and the storyteller in our age of ecological crisis. The inspiration for The Nightingales Song, which spends time with British folk singer Sam Lee during nightingale season as he joins the bird in mutual song, grew from a special interview we held with Sam in 2021. To accompany the film, we’re returning to this conversation with Sam, where he shares the story of how the call of the nightingale opened him to a kinship with the more-than-human. Reflecting on how this bird has served as a “wisdom keeper” and “unlocker” of hearts for generations of poets, musicians, and storytellers, he also speaks more about his process of leading audiences into this magical space of communion with the nightingale each spring. Read the transcript. Watch the film The Nightingale's Song, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, the first in our four-part Shifting Landscapes documentary film series. Photo by Dominick Tyler. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this conversation, held in May at the Architectural Association in London, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and architect, artist, and journalist Marko Milovanovic talk about Time, our fifth annual print edition, and our exploration of the mystery that lies beyond our humancentric notions of Time. Ranging from the kinds of time that can bring us back into relationship with the living world, to the mystical Sufi poet Rumi, and the impulses shaping our print editions, this talk explores the vision behind Emergence to help reweave the worlds of ecology, culture, and spirituality, and once again understand the Earth is alive, animate, and sacred. Read the transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this conversation from our Shifting Landscapes exhibition, Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is joined by Marshmallow Laser Feast creative director Ersin Han Ersin, one of the artists behind the exhibition’s large-scale installation, Breathing with the Forest, which invites you into an experience of exchanging breath with a forest in the Colombian Amazon. Talking about the ways MLF’s projects bring together science and imagination to illuminate the hidden connections within the living world, Ersin speaks to the power of sensory engagement, wonder, and awe to broaden our perception of more-than-human experiences. Explore our special online adaptation of Breathing with the Forest. Read the transcript. Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast and Sandra Ciampone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we step into a forest aware and listening to what surrounds us—remembering that the living world is just as aware of our presence—a relationship of reciprocity can take root. How might such a quality of attention change our ability to see, feel, and give ourselves to the landscapes around us? In this audio practice, writer and certified nature and forest therapy guide Kimberly Ruffin takes us on a sensory walk to meet the soil, sky, smells, and sounds of the forest. Encouraging us to “be a part of the music of a place,” this practice beckons us to witness, and be witnessed by, the living world.  Sign up for our newsletter to hear more stories as they are released each week. Photo by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How would our response to the ecological crisis be different if we understood that our own consciousness is as wild as the breathing Earth around us? In this conversation, poet, translator, and author David Hinton reaches back to a time when cultures were built around a reverence for the Earth and proposes that the sixth extinction we now face is rooted in philosophical assumptions about our separation from the living world. Urging us to reweave mind and landscape, he offers an ethics tempered by love and kinship as a way to navigate our era of disconnection. Read the transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did the vast and varied chorus of modern sounds—from forests to oceans to human music—emerge from within life’s community? When did the living Earth first start to sing? In this immersive sonic journey, biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell opens our senses to unexplored auditory landscapes through spoken words and terrestrial sounds, tuning our ears to the tiny, trembling waves of sound all around us. Hearing three billion years of our planet’s sound evolution in the trills, bugles, clicks, and pulses of the life around him, David invites us into the space of connection with deep time and the more-than-human world that opens when we tune in to the Earth’s orchestra. If you enjoy this audio story, check out David’s companion practice, Playful Listening, which invites you to immerse yourself in the sonic world around you. And listen to our interview with David, “Listening and the Crisis of Inattention,” on our website. Illustration by Daniel Liévano. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Equipped with his binaural microphone system, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton has spent the last forty years traveling the world documenting the sounds of the Earth and its inhabitants. Recording the noise pollution that permeates nearly all places on the planet, Gordon also listens for silence, for the sounds that emerge in the absence of noise. This week, we return to our audio adaptation of our virtual reality experience Sanctuaries of Silence—one of the first stories we released back in 2018. Guided by Gordon, we embark into the Hoh Rain Forest, one of the quietest places in North America. As he attunes our ears to its silence, we begin to hear the music of life emerge in every direction—the murmur of the river, the shuffle of trees, the cacophony of birdsong. We recommend putting on headphones for this one, so you can have the best listening experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can we repair our connection with what we eat, rejoining the biological web that we are a part of? In this conversation, fermentation expert Sandor Katz unpacks his book Fermentation as Metaphor, guiding us through the lessons taught by microorganisms as they change form. Exploring how our fear of the other, the unseen, and the unknowable has divorced us from the wonder of fermentation, Sandor shows us how engaging with microbial communities through food—breads, fungi, pickles, yogurts—can bring us into relationship with the tiny but vital unseen forces of the living world. Read the transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What becomes possible, especially in the face of crisis, when we orient our consciousness towards uncertainty, emptiness, and a sense of relationship with the world beyond the self? In this week’s conversation, Australian writer and Zen teacher Susan Murphy Roshi immerses us in the tradition of Zen koan and its ability to shift our consciousness amid crisis. Delving into the power of the not-knowing mind, Susan presents koan as a gateway to truly connecting with the world around us, and speaks to how we must respond to our moment of suffering from a place of openness if we are to remember our seamlessness with all of creation. Read the transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spending time with a landscape opens us to the language it speaks. Can we quiet our own voices enough to hear what the Earth has to say? This week, Jenny Odell takes us on a walk through the folds and furrows of her Oakland neighborhood, listening for the memories embedded in the shape of her surroundings. Sensing the language of her local terrain, she begins to tune in to the age-old conversation between rock and water. By cultivating this sustained attention, Jenny shows how we can ask a place, as we would a person, what is your story? Read the essay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices