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

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

This month, we released the third volume of our print edition, Living with the Unknown, where we asked the question,

what does living and unfolding apocalyptic reality look like?

Over the past year, we invited writers, artists, poets, and photographers to explore this through the themes of initiation, ashes, roots, and futures, moving

from the raw unknowing of transformation to a place of rooted possibility.

Over the coming months, we'll be releasing a new story each week, both on our website

and as an episode on our podcast.

We begin where all inquiries into the unknown begin, with myth, and an invitation

to navigate the mysteries with acclaimed mythologist Martin Shaw, as he invites us to

subvert today's voices of certainty as we walk

our questions into a troubled future.

The correct response to uncertainty is myth-making. It always was, not punditry, allegory or mandate, but myth-making,

the creation of stories. We're tuned to do so right down to our bones. The bewilderment,

vivacity, and downright slog of life requires it. And such emerging art forms are not to cure or even resolve uncertainty,

but to deepen into it. There's no solving uncertainty. Myth-making is an imaginative labor,

not a frantic attempt to shift the mood to steady a ground.

There isn't any.

But, a major but, maybe there's useful and un-useful uncertainty.

The un-useful is the skittish, fatiguing dimension, the surface of the condition. The useful is the invitation to depth that myth always offers, because if there's uncertainty, then we are no longer sure

quite what's the right way to behave. And there's potential in that, an openness to new forms. We are susceptible

...