Everywhere I look, things are changing. The world is unraveling along cultural, spiritual, and ideological lines. The old narratives no longer hold the power they once had. Many of us harbor an unsettling feeling: a feeling of being full yet empty at the same time, free-floating toward a future that feels both uncertain and pre-ordained.

For a long time, I wrestled with this contradiction in my own life. It's what compelled me to go to the places in the world where culture and tradition hadn't yet been flattened by our modern monoculture. To seek, to witness, to ask, to learn.

But the more I've traveled, the more I've come to see that this restless struggle is inescapable. It is playing out across cultures and communities everywhere, in varying timelines, and on varying scales.

What are we to do?

The old stories of the world told of times like these: times of great calamity, and of great sorrow.

I believe those stories are still alive… They have to be. Because we are alive. And though the instinct in uncertain times is to retreat into familiar narratives, into stories whose ending we already know, a world that retreats into itself stops growing…
I believe there is nothing more dangerous.

Things change, the world turns. How many times has humankind withered and bloomed? Many ancient cultures understood this; they formed stories that taught us how to move through change rather than be destroyed by it. What we have to look forward to is transformation. That moment when we, as individuals, as communities, as a species, decide what to carry forward and what to leave behind.

All things ebb and flow. Meaning outlasts the forms that once held it… And in time, finds new ones.

It was true then, it is true now.

A new sun greets the crumbling ruins of an ancient fortress, Morocco