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. So in part one of this episode series, we dove into the historic centrality and total normalcy of visionary experience, how culture is built upon visions, built upon the trembling utterances of

oracles, how the body of culture needs those who feel, who see, who receive, whose eyes are

flooded with sight and whose ears receive voices and songs, who listen to the river and translate for the river,

and sing the song of the river aloud for all who might hear.

People whose bodies, you could say, are the living antenna of culture.

Sensitive, awake, feeling, and receiving, receiving in states of heightened perception,

glimpses into the unfolding pattern of nature, and how that pattern translates into the lives of communities and ecologies.

And we spoke about how all across the world traditional cultures have provided a container, an ecology, for visions.

Visions had a place in which to grow, to incubate, to be fostered, to live, and to thrive.

And so the intuitive, the visionary, was not other, but was woven into the very

fabric of culture. What is an ecology in which visions thrive? What does it look like? It looks like

Iroquois dreaming culture. It looks like Achuar culture and Kaluli culture and the deep ancestral orientation of the cultures of the Solomon Islands. But it also looks like 15th century France. The French province of Lorraine was a fertile place for visions and voices.

There were sacred groves.

There were gatherings in those groves in which stories were whispered ear to ear.

And sometimes if the conditions were just right, a saint would pay a visit and speak to someone.

A person would hear in their ear the reverberation of sanctified words and feel the sweet stir of sanctified breath upon the breeze.

The breath of the saints there in the grove of beech trees. Because saints were not lofty, far-off figures.

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