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. 2020 was, for me, in many ways, a year of dragons. Somehow I seem to repeatedly find myself

traveling through land that holds dragon story.

I didn't plan it, but everywhere my family and I turned, it seemed, there was a dragon.

A dragon breathing as Highland missed.

A dragon spine protruding along the horizon.

I'd ask, what's the story of this place?

And sure enough, somewhere a dragon would emerge from the deep pools of that story.

As if to say, see, we are everywhere.

Remember us. Remember how all this, all this, to say, see, we are everywhere.

Remember us.

Remember how all this, all this mythos, this is all in some ways, dragon story.

For me, this episode is the fulfillment of a long, spiraling dream.

For dragons shaped my early life,

my early imagination.

There were dragons in the Japanese and Tibetan Buddhist

stories of my upbringing,

dragons in the drawings I drew and in the games that I played.

...