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. If you listen to the old stories, you notice something right away.

Everything is alive.

In the myths and fairy tales, animacy is everywhere.

There are talking trees and singing stones.

There are sprites of brook and wood.

There are hedges that speak and move of their own will and snag unwary travelers in their brambles,

and cliffs that swallow picnicking Australian schoolgirls,

and there are wisps and whites and green cannibal lights in the northern skies.

But it's not just natural phenomena in their unaltered state that are imbued with this life,

this vibrancy, this animacy. Objects, fashioned objects,

exhibit similar life in the old stories. Mirrors, speak, swords, dance. There are flying carpets

and far-seeing eyeglasses and cloaks and boots with minds of their own.

There are animate teapots and decks of cards and walking sticks that are talking sticks

and quills that write by themselves and on and on. And this pervasive insistence in the fairy tales and

myths and folk tales and stories, this pervasive,

almost rude insistence that everything, absolutely everything is alive, that everything has eyes,

even the least of creations, even a quill or a brush or a shoe or a ribbon, that everything has a voice,

...