Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald,

currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world

and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination.

The Emerald.

All that's happening on this green jewel in space. When I was 10 years old or so, my family did a cross-country drive from where we lived in upstate New York to what would become our new home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I remember it well. I used to love road trips as a kid. I liked highway

truck stops, those greasy rectangles of hash browns, which provided the perfect vehicle for

ridiculous quantities of ketchup. And after the relative claustrophobia of the East Coast, with

buildings and trees so close that there was never a real

sense of horizon, that feeling of the whole world opening up, opening into long stretches of highway

and possibility, as if my mind and heart were opening right along with it. I remember a seemingly

endless sea of rolling corn. An occasional shady tree broke that eternal corn sea with an inevitable

cluster of cows gathered underneath to escape the noonday, Nebraska heat. In childhood time,

that corn sea went on forever, until finally at last, mountains. We came in south from Colorado

on 285. There were thunderheads up above, and the late

afternoon light was streaming through in rays, illuminating the dry hills with what poet Gerard

Manley Hopkins once called doom fire. And to the west, mesas and mountains receded into a horizon

shaped like interlocking puzzle pieces of transparent blue light.

I remember saying, look to my parents excitedly, and I think that excitement came from the fact that the

rules that I had known of place had changed. Transparent canyons could overlap. Earth could be blue.

You could see rainstorms as distinct, skirted

being sweeping across a landscape. The world was different than I had imagined, and in stoking my

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