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There are adaptive reasons why our attention drifts from what we depend on until scarcity forces it back.

The myth of Tefnut, the Egyptian goddess of moisture, is an ancient metaphor that fought this bind.

Breaking the bind may require practicing awareness, reverence, and reciprocity.

We like to think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, conquering our days through sheer wit and grit. For the most part, we are wrong. Moment by moment, we are held by innumerable relationships and systems that operate largely outside our awareness.

Watch a toddler insist, “I do it myself,” wrestling a shoe onto the wrong foot. Their confidence depends on an invisible foundation of food, rest, protection, and caregiving. Humanity runs on the same arrangement, scaled up almost past comprehension.

Consider water: This ordinary substance keeps our bodies running, cycling through clouds, rivers, and living bodies across time. Some fraction of your water glass may have passed through a dinosaur. We drink it daily without a flicker of wonder because it is reliably there.

Here lies a condition of being human: We commonly disregard what sustains us until it becomes uncertain or disappears.

Ancient Egyptian mythology tells this story through Tefnut, goddess of moisture and precipitation, one of the Ennead of Heliopolis, and the primordial pair from which earth and sky emerge (Johnson, 2019).

At some point, she gets........

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