 An important thing to understand about the new story for Earth, a few things. One is that it's maybe not new, it's new for a mass civilization, but it certainly has ancient roots in the world stories of indigenous people. Second thing to understand is that we do not create the story. It's not that a bunch of smart people get together and we say, okay, what's the new story going to be? Let's figure it out. Let's concoct the most beneficial new story, because then you start getting into arguments about what it's going to be. Is it going to be built on the blockchain? Is it going to be nanotechnology? I mean, there's all kinds of different versions of what the world should be. So I want to say right now, I don't know what the new story is. Actually, that's not quite what I want to say. It's more like any articulate form that I could put it into is less than what it really is. There's a knowing that I share with many people about what the new story is. I can recognize something as part of it, but if I try to encompass it in words and concepts, I've reduced it a little bit. And that doesn't mean I don't try, because the words and concepts can orient us toward the emerging story. So I often use Thich Nhat Hanh's term for it, interbeing, which it's not oneness, but it understands that separation isn't as true as we thought it was, that we're not separate individuals in a world of other, but that my being is intimately connected to your being, intimately connected to the being of the whales, of the rainforest, of every other being on Earth, of every other people on Earth. That our existence itself is relational. That's one way I like to describe the new story. As far as the relationship to the planet goes, you apply that and you understand, oh, okay, what happens to the ecosphere is important to ourselves as well. That our well-being, our thriving depends on the well-being and thriving of the ecosystem. Even if we could come up with technological substitutes for every ecosystem's service, even if we could build a concrete world with bubble cities and dispense with nature entirely and fulfill the dream of the old story, you can see it in the Jetsons, the cartoon, that used to be a cultural reference, everybody understood now I'm getting old, but it was like this futuristic, it was supposed to be like a positive view of the future where there's no living beings except for humans and their dog and everybody lives in a bubble city served by robots, everything's artificial, everything's mechanical, like that was the future and that was considered inevitable. So, yeah, and so we understand that even if we could do that, that would be a hell and not a paradise, that it's not about survival. So interbeing then calls us into a partnership with nature with the rest of life. It invites us to listen into what wants to happen next for us and for all beings. And to see the rest of life not as resources or providers of ecosystem services but as collaborators and co-creators and something, and we begin to ask, why are we here? If not to impose our design on the world and transcend nature, then what? Why are we here? What is our service? What are we meant to do with these tremendous gifts that we have? What is our calling here? I'm not going to give you the answer to that. It's the question that's more important than the answer at this time. Even asking that question is a powerful prayer.