Hunter-gatherers built a stone monument before farms existed, a clue to what first drew strangers together.

The walls we built for shelter and status slowly became a prison, separating us from nature and each other.

Feeling anxious and lonely in a hyperconnected world may reflect how far we’ve drifted from who we are.

Why are we here? What is our purpose? How shall we live? We humans have probably been asking these big questions for as long as we have been human.

We understand our world through stories. Without meaning to, we built a prison for ourselves, and remembering who we truly are is what sets us free.

In his novel Ishmael, Daniel Quinn describes two stories humans have lived by. In one, the world belongs to us. In the other, we belong to the world. For nearly all of our history, we lived the second story. When we began to farm and settle down roughly 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, we started living the first.

So we moved indoors. We built houses, villages, and cities. Walls kept out the cold and the predators, and those dreaded “others.” They also kept us from seeing that we are part of nature, not apart from it. Slowly, our walls became a prison of separateness.

In a later book, The Story of B, Quinn named what happened next: the Great Forgetting. Our culture lost touch with the long human story that came before it, as if humanity began where civilization did.

A Shared Quest for the Divine

Think about the last time you stood under a sky full of stars. Most of us have felt very small and very lucky at the same moment, an awe that is both humbling and connecting. How did we get here? What are we part of?

For a long time, the story of civilization ran in one direction.........

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