Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald, Currants 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. These are Mythic Times.

This is what storyteller and mythologist Martin Shaw said in a recent interview with Emergence magazine.

Mythic Times.

Plagues and pestilence, burning forests, dying ecosystems. Villains so

cartoonish they outdo anything ever conceived of in the cartoons. Wastelands of the Spirit,

weather control, weird times at Walmart. Half the world burns, and half the world seemingly longs for nothing more than an enchanted

sleep. We're half awake in our fake empire, as the song goes, floating in an opiated void of

digital content and shopping options and comfort and convenience, a spiral of incessant monetization, in which

digital dollars auto-dduct from imaginary accounts, and some get more imaginary zeros and some

less, and some have no zeros at all, zero-zero, as you could say, and some live in high castles

with helicopter pads and golden toilets, and can make worlds appear at their

fingertips. And just outside their castle gates, millions of children have no clean water to drink.

Try that for a fairy tale. Mythic times. Like all who feel, I've probably longed for that moment of planetary awakening. You know, that

moment where old snake skins are suddenly shed and blinking eyes find the morning sun,

and marketing executives and stockbrokers rise from their cubicles and proclaim, this doesn't

matter. None of this actually matters. And we find the closest

meadow and shake free our barnacled hearts and begin the long dance of renewal. And we drink again

of clear stream waters. And we turn our faces to the gathering clouds. And turn our hearts to the blue-black center of those clouds,

...