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. My first memory is of light.

The brightness of light, light all around. I was sitting among

on a quilt on the ground.

Very large, white pillows.

That's a quote from Georgia O'Keefe, the mid-20th century painter who lived just up the road about 40 minutes from my hometown, Santa Fe.

You can see it, right, in your mind's eye, those pillows all illuminated?

Starchy white cotton in the morning sun. I bet you can.

Georgia O'Keefe came to New Mexico, as many artists do, for the light.

Light travels effortlessly through these vast, high, desert skies, touches here and there upon the jagged land,

illuminates both with all-encompassing totality and with razor-like precision, clear, stark, severe, sacred light.

Sometimes it's what I've heard called Jehovah Light, like a motivational poster in a church,

rays beaming down from behind a single cloud, that blazing, Hebraic visionary fire.

Other times, it's late afternoon magic hour light on the mud walls,

that light that quite possibly caused Conquistador DeVargas to think that he'd found El Dorado, the lost cities of gold.

There's a specific light in New Mexico that I call thunderstorm light, when the desert foreground

is lit up blazing gold against a backdrop of dark blue-black thunder clouds. There's nothing like it, it's magnetic.

That same thunderstorm light once transported an Indian boy named Gadadar in Bengal in the

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