vp190423 Emeralda love 

Why I love to play Emeralda

It’ time like this moment when I go about what has become a daily routine of sorting and reviewing essays that I wrote over the past ten years, getting ready for my next volume of Ritchie Mined, the collected essays of a decade of my musings.

In this instance, it’s finding the words of Mark C. Taylor, who used the phrase, game of life, in a book titled The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Published in 2001, my reading notes run to 20 cards! Apparently, I had a scanner equipped with OCR, because I couldn’t have written such copious notes without it.
On can tell, also, by the mistakes. For example, one finds Viener when it is Wiener (Norbert) Taylor is referring to.
As I read these notes, in the back of my mind is a Botswanan woman at an airport in Johannesburg, South Africa. In six hours, her plane takes off, headed for New York and, after a ten-hour layover, Seattle, where we will meet.
What this has to do with Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life, and Mark C. Taylor, is my current, daily task of checking essays I wrote over the past decade – 2010-2019.
But there is more to it. My task is to develop consciousness of EarthSafe 2022 – a development that came to me in 1992 through learning about the Union of Concerned Scientists. I made up a principle reason to pursue my art, craft and design and named it EarthSafe 2022 with the scientists’ warning in mind: We had 30 years to save Earth’s human and other life sustainability.
The first step is to be conscious of another human being, hopefully one who is, like me, who wants to contribute something to save Earth’s human and other life sustainability. In the case of the Botswanan woman, the lives of bees.
What is an artist/professor to do? Our granddaughter, Matilda, gave me some sense of direction, for she would surely live to 2022 and, looking around, maybe she would wonder, What did grandfather Ritchie do in the face of the scientists’ warning?
Returning to today’s Emeralda Play, I had to smile because Mark C. Taylor’s subtitle, Emerging Network Culture, was, and is, prophetic. If I took the time to re-read his tome, I might find a sense of what to do to achieve a safe earth for our granddaughter.
However, I saw enough in the limits of my time at 6:00 in the morning. I saw it connected with the 18 cards I have in my pocket. Seventeen are those of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (shared with the Botswanan woman, I think) and the 18^th card, Printmaking Access.
Also, there is the game I made up called Proximates. You must invent it to win it, as the saying goes. Taylor’s words I have noted in my reading notes, filed under Art Student in my directories, are surely a rewarding find and proof that Emeralda Works.