Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

The brilliant red of the sky as the sun rises, the translucent blue-green of the sea, the warm yellow light of late afternoon, the complete blackness

of space, the beauty of such impossible colors within nature has driven the human pursuit

of capturing their likeness for hundreds of thousands of years. In our attempts to recreate

the colors of the earth for our art, our clothes, our makeup,

and many other things, we more often than not have done so by mixing and alchemizing matter

drawn from the flesh of the earth herself.

In this week's essay, nonfiction writer Stephanie Quiswanos probes the histories of our

most iconic pigments,

from ochre to bone black, lapis lazuli to mummy brown,

and the intersection of colonialism, capitalism, and the more than human world,

the crushing of metamorphic rock, the extraction of mucus from sea snails

that led to these colors' creation.

Curious about how we relate to color, how we attribute meaning to certain hues,

and also how we label people with color,

Stephanie invites us to see beyond aesthetics into the entwinement of human and land,

and how the colors that emerge between hold both lightness and darkness.

If one could only catch the true color of nature, the very thought of it drives me mad,

Andrew Wyeth. Oaker

Darkness-filled Font-Degum Cave, but dark is not the same as the color black.

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