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. Hey everyone. This has been an episode I've been looking forward to doing for a long time.

And you could say it's a little love song to all the fire signs out there, speaking as a fellow fire sign.

You finally got your day. And just a couple of notes here at the

beginning. First is, as many of you know, this podcast is supported and funded by patrons. There is a

Patreon community, patreon.com slash the Emerald podcast. And I depend on the contribution of patrons so that I can do this podcast full

time. So if you feel like you've gotten something from the podcast, if you feel like it provides

some value in your life, please consider becoming a patron. It costs as little as $6 a month.

And patrons get access to patrons only content.

There's a whole lot of it at this point that's built up over the years, and access to a twice-monthly study group in which we explore these mythic topics in more depth and detail.

And I'm excited to be launching something that I've been speaking about for a few months here on

the podcast.

And this is a small granting program that's a way of giving back to patrons and supporting

their projects that are designed to keep this vision of animacy alive.

What that means in practice is that small grants are going to be available

twice yearly to projects that are either designed to be preserving traditional animacies,

or for projects that are innovating new and different perspectives on the animate.

These projects could be artistic, they could be scholarly, they could be research-based projects,

...