A Path Older Than Memory
Paul Salopek in conversation on the Emergence Magazine Podcast
Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.
In this conversation, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Salopek, who is a decade into a remarkable journey retracing, on foot, the migration pathway taken by the first humans out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Speaking to us from the Liaoning province in northeastern China, Paul shares how moving at three miles per hour has deepened his personal relationship to time. As he becomes attuned to what he terms “sacramental time,” the boundaries between the physical and metaphysical begin to blur into an expansive experience of timelessness.
Read the transcript.
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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.
Paul Salopek is an award-winning journalist who is currently on a years-long journey retracing the path of the earliest Homo sapiens on foot from the Horn of Africa toward the tip of South America. Paul has been recognized with two Pulitzer Prizes, the George Polk Award, the National Press Club Award, and the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage in Journalism, and his foreign correspondence has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, National Geographic, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The American Scholar. He has been a McGraw Visiting Professor at Princeton University and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation.
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is an Emmy- and Peabody Award–nominated filmmaker and a Sufi teacher. His films include: Earthrise, Sanctuaries of Silence, The Atomic Tree, Counter Mapping, Marie’s Dictionary, and Elemental. His films have been screened at New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and Hot Docs, exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum, and featured on PBS POV, National Geographic, and New York Times Op-Docs. He is the founder and executive editor of Emergence Magazine.
Photo by Paul Salopek, National Geographic
