From the melting polar caps to violence in our cities to the rise of fascist governments, ours is an age in which we seem to be able to agree on almost nothing—except that we are in crisis. It would be easy to think of the rising anxiety I'm feeling as disconnected from the rising sea levels, or to think of the migrant crisis as unrelated to the violence in our inner cities. But at the core, all of our crises actually share some of the same roots, and part of the individual healing process involves exploring those roots collectively.

This book is about this global crisis, but it isn't about the melting polar caps, or CO₂ levels, or temperature. It isn't about increasing economic disparities, racism, or sexism. It's about a climate of loneliness that has taken over the planet—a planet of shrinking resources, imagination, hope. But how can we be hopeful when news of our demise comes on the television every night? How can we learn to share our resources when we are told that we can only find meaning by consuming more? Most significantly, how can we live as though the planet itself is a single, interconnected community when we have been told that our purpose is to find only individual success, only individual salvation?

I suggest that our spiritual malaise—the loneliness and loss of meaning—is connected to our ecological, political, and economic crises. It's all connected; and it's all about the deep story we tell about who we are and our place in the world. And this all comes down to how we educate our children.

Let me explain.

There's something in the air, as thick and unmistakable as the CO₂ particulates, even if it isn't as easily quantified. All around us, there is an anxiety about our future, about the future of our children. And like climate change, this anxiety is so massive, so all‐encompassing and ‐consuming, that it feels impossible to escape, impossible to confront.

We also live in an age of anger, and in an age of fear. But of all the emotions that dominate our age, I believe that loneliness is the most pervasive. It is loneliness that tortures the internet troll or Wall Street executive who never seems to have enough; it is loneliness that leads us to addictions to shopping or food or anti‐anxiety meds.

In some ways, this is my greatest fear and, perhaps, that which we all fear: being alone, really alone. I've often suggested that this is the ultimate salvation we are all seeking—true communion, connection—far more than any lonely, segregated paradise.

Why are we lonely? The reasons are complex and have to do with the habits and lifestyles of the modern world. We spend less time with family and community; we spend more time staring at screens. But our loneliness begins with a story, a story about who we are on the most fundamental level. This story tells us that our deepest identity is individual, and that we need to buy our way into a meaningful life.

It's unmistakable how lonely we all are. You can feel it in crowds, among the masses of people ignoring one another, staring at their own privatized virtual space in favor of the physical world. How is it that I can feel less lonely alone in my living room, listening to Coltrane, than I do on a crowded bus? This feeling reveals to us that loneliness isn't entirely about being alone, at least not the kind of loneliness I am talking about. I am referring to more than the sadness at missing one's kin. This is a cosmic loneliness. This loneliness is the product of a narrative that tells us that our ultimate identity is individual, that we are not, in fact, in this together.

And we aren't just lacking in community with other people; we have lost our ecological place in the family of beings. We've lost our intimacy with the Earth—its rivers, its mountains, its seas—and the other species that make it up, that make us who we are. This requires us to experience the Earth in intimacy, not just stare at screens and drive from one sterile, climate‐controlled space to another. It requires us to feel the texture of our world again, to fall in love again.

The climate crisis teaches us that we are an interconnected planet—decisions made on one continent impact another. Less widely considered is this crisis of the inner climate. This inner climate is, like the outer, interconnected. Our emotional lives are ecological webs, not isolated individuals. So, if the inner life is made toxic by a toxic story, we become unbalanced. I don't need to use extreme examples like mass shooters or oil spills here. Just spend some time on social media or watch the plastic bags floating down your street. There is something even more profound than the realization of our interconnectedness: our emotions are a part of the ecosystem and a part of the Earth itself.

And so, we must let go of the notion that loneliness—whether it's expressed on social media or by the person sitting in the cubical next to you, addicted to their meds—is merely an individual, psychological problem, a mental health issue. Loneliness, by its very nature, cannot be cured individually. It is a shared problem. It is a cultural problem. A problem of story.

OUR STORY

Think back to your earliest memories of childhood. What is one of the first stories you remember? If your childhood was like mine, you may recall curling up somewhere with a parent or another elder, listening to a story. Or perhaps you can recall attending a church or another place of worship and hearing the stories passed down through the generations. It was in these moments that you would have learned life's deepest and most important lessons. Through human touch, voice, and the magic of words, you began to put your world together. You began to discover your place in the world.

There is nothing more quintessentially human than sharing a story. Before there were books or churches, there were human communities that had to figure out how to survive in a dangerous and uncertain world. Humans weren't as fast as the antelope, as strong as the elephant, or as sharp‐toothed as the lion. Their special gift and skill was the ability to care for each other and work together—to build community. And they did this through the magic of language and story.

In spite of those early childhood memories, many of us often wonder why it is that we don't simply act rationally to solve our problems. It's because any rational act is always performed in context—the unspoken, unseen story that lies behind our actions. If we have a story that tells us we are radically separate from the Earth, and from other people, and that our purpose is disembodied, individual salvation, it is rational to ignore the impact of climate change; it is rational for a society to have extreme—and growing—economic disparities; it is rational to think of our struggles as our own rather than part of the same collective struggle.

Modernity—the worldview that is based on the story I have referred to as the cosmology of loneliness—is rooted in the emergence of colonialism and capitalism. In these systems, lines were drawn—both in maps and in the human imagination—to separate that which is valued or sacred from that which is considered a mere resource. Even other human beings could be exploited or enslaved in such a system. Forests were razed, lakes and rivers redirected and poisoned. The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century put an increased importance on the salvation of the individual and taught that prosperity was a sign of God's favor: What did it matter if we destroyed the Earth if we were just trying to leave it all behind to get into heaven anyway? We couldn't be blamed for exploiting workers if this was merely God's will, a sign of our favor and their condemnation, could we? Many human beings gained a great deal of wealth and advanced technologically during this period, but it came at a great cost. We lost our place in the world.

While the notion of seeing a more interconnected world may seem radical, it is consistent with human cultures throughout most of history. All cultures have shared stories—myths—that reveal their core assumptions and values and help place the individual in relationship to the community, including the non‐human, ecological community. For millennia, small groups of humans lived in a story that allowed them to understand themselves as interrelated to their world and embedded in a web of ecological and social relationships. But things have changed.

THE COSMOLOGY OF LONELINESS AND EDUCATION FOR LIBERATION

I will use the term cosmology synonymously with worldview, a way to describe how basic assumptions about the order of the world and our place in it, brought forth by cultural narratives. Cosmic loneliness is the result of a narrative that advocates for radical, absolute individualism. It isn't merely the product of being alone; it is the way we experience the world when our worldview is rooted in a story that tells us we are fundamentally separate from others, when we privilege independence over interdependence and relationship. How does this actually look in the world? In other words, how is the world put together through this story? Let's look at a few different elements of human experience.

1. The Political. “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” writes Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The political landscape today is dominated by the reality of our arrival at the precipice, the edge of our world. Indeed, we are in the midst of falling off the cliff of an old story, a cosmo‐vision that organized our world for the last 500 years, a story called Modernity. Our choice is stark: we can attempt to cling to the imagined past, reaching for the ever‐receding cliff—this choice is called fascism, a political system that focuses on power, nationalism, and conservative values—or embrace a new vision.
2. The Economic. The capitalist system feeds and is fed by loneliness. Lonely people need to buy what they are selling; for it is through our sense of ourselves as isolated individuals that we have the need to consume infinitely, and this is what the system requires.
3. The Ecological. Our sense of ourselves as disconnected from the ecological web of life is part and parcel of the cosmology of loneliness.
4. The Social. Our social interactions have become increasingly mediated, and decreasingly organic. The paradox of social media as that while we have increased our capacity to connect on a superficial level, we have become increasingly isolated and lonely.

So how did we get here? How did we end up seeing ourselves as alone rather than part of the interconnected web of life, in spite of what we know from modern science and in spite of what we have always known in the cosmologies of every traditional culture on the planet?

I use the word “education” in its broadest sense here, in that it is simply the way in which a culture conveys to its young people who they are, why they are, and where they might seek to go. In this way, our current approach to education reinforces the cosmology of loneliness through its very structure, its processes, its stories.

To understand how this happens in the Modern classroom, it is useful to understand the metaphors of modern education—the fundamental stories and symbols through which we understand our world and upon which the structure of the classroom is based. The relationship between world and classroom is recursive: the cultural narratives that shape our world determine the shape of the classroom; in turn, the classroom's core metaphors shape the world our children will create. I believe that our schools are based upon three metaphors that guide our civilization.

1. The Factory. Arising out of the industrial revolution, Modern schools are designed like factories, conceiving of the student as a product. Our students move from class to class, a little of each subject deposited in them—empty vessels—for a precise amount of time. The mechanistic nature of the school gives rise to a world conceived of as a machine.
2. The Prison. This is perhaps most obvious among marginalized youth, for whom the emphasis is on the punitive rather than the restorative. The idea here is that the child is fundamentally flawed and must be disciplined into success. The school and the community in which it is placed are something to be escaped. In addition to the obvious racist and classist overtones at play here, there are also subtle Christian undertones rooted in the Augustinian Fall. The world is fallen and flawed, as is the human. It is something to be escaped.
3. The Free Market. More recently, the notion that our schools ought to run according to the principles of free market capitalism has become increasingly popular. School districts are run by “CEOs”—often technocrats rather than educators—rather than superintendents. In programs like “Race to the Top” they are pitted against one another, competing for resources. And individual students in the classroom are pitted against one another, competitors rather than collaborators. This metaphor affects the curriculum as well. Rather than a liberatory curriculum, or at least one that helps a child grow into an adult capable of participating in the democratic process, our curricula are increasingly driven by the market and seek to foster skills and knowledge in order to compete in the global economy.

One will notice that with all three narratives, individuals are emphasized over relationships. Each is a deficit narrative, a story that emphasizes what the child lacks, rather than an asset narrative, emphasizing the gifts and wisdom that each child brings. At moments of crisis, we require not merely to know the stories of the culture; we require a pedagogy that reimagines these stories. In the next chapter, I offer alternative metaphors for classrooms that are organic and relational, fostering liberatory and asset‐based pedagogies.

EDUCATION

Years ago, I traveled around the world, across Asia overland, through north Africa and Europe, and back to Chicago. I learned many things along the way—indeed, I encountered the poverty, the polluted air, and shrinking resources I refer to in this book—but perhaps more than anything I learned the reality of the singularity of this planet, an island from which we cannot escape. Choices made by wealthy countries on one side of the planet were determining the lives of poor children on the other. We are stuck with each other, in this immense planet we cannot escape.

After my trip around the world, I went back to school, studying the world's great mystical and mythological traditions. But I couldn't seem to get away from my roots as an educator on the margins. While in school in California, I teamed up with a teacher to co‐create a program for teens. I had learned from my travels and from my studies that the world's wisdom traditions all told their deepest truths not in lists of rules but in their stories. I also saw that the stories young people had about themselves were often their biggest impediment. For example, young people who dropped out of school or got arrested were always taught that this was simply because of their “poor choices.” And surely there is some truth to that. But only in a worldview that isolates the individual as radically as ours could we reach the conclusion that anyone's life was only the product of personal choice. We are interconnected; our stories are woven together. When an adolescent gets in trouble, the story is far more complex than individual choice. The individual is a web of relationships. A young person who drops out of school didn't choose an inequitable society, a dysfunctional family, or a failing school system.

The high school dropout didn't choose that any more than we choose climate change, or the shrinking of the middle class. But somehow, we tend to blame those on the margins for their own marginalization while absolving the richest and greediest who are causing so much destruction. We refer condescendingly to certain kids as “at‐risk,” but what of our at‐risk planet, our at‐risk species? Indeed, the notion that consumer choice would be the solution to climate change is based on a false premise, radical individualism. But not only is it not the solution, it's actually a major cause.

While surely there are those who have good intentions when they try to push consumers toward more sustainable choices, just as educators mean well when they try to get their most at‐risk students to make good choices. But the fetish of individual choice is rooted in the story behind the capitalist system, and this is the system that is causing both the climate crisis and social inequity in the first place. We all need a new story, not just those on the margins. This isn't about blame; it's about a story that can help us all find our place and recognize that we are not really alone, but that we are in this together, on this single planet.

In 2009, I moved to Chicago and started the Chicago Wisdom Project, a program to work with youth on the south side of Chicago. Over time, we developed a process that gave our young people the tools to reimagine their stories. This process isn't just healing for the participant. It also transforms the student into a teacher. The practices that the reader will find within this book have been developed in this process in dialogue with intellectual and academic ideas. They come forth out of the work that our teachers—including me—have done together with students. Sometimes the ideas we have had didn't exactly work out the way we expected. And that's okay. A curriculum ought not be created in the abstract, but co‐created with the intrinsic imagination of the classroom. Over time, as we grew and merged with the Baltimore Wisdom Project to form Wisdom Projects, Inc., these ideas have continued to evolve. New practices, new ideas, new stories have emerged as students and teachers learn together.

The stories we tell offer new ways of seeing the world. That's why it's especially important that our stories come from multiple points of view, especially from those at the margins. There is a wisdom there that simply won't be found by those at the centers of power, from those who benefit from our current systems.

But before we can reimagine a story, it's helpful to return to the lessons learned from an example of a learning space that is in many ways the opposite of the modern classrooms that promote the modern story of individualism—the one‐room schoolhouse. To understand what that might be, we don't need to look at the curriculum. Rather, we need to imagine how the learning process would unfold in this space.

I often invite people to visualize what they think of when they hear the word “classroom.” Usually, it is some version of rows of desks with a teacher in the front. If it is a high school classroom, there will be a bell to alert them to move on to the next classroom. But when I ask what it means to be “educated” or about the times during which they learned the most, seldom is this narrow vision of the classroom involved: they are often outside, creating something, exploring the world, working together in community. Tellingly, when I ask people when they've felt most alive, or most fully human, the answers are similar. The work is to get the classroom to become the context for learning, for being alive and fully human.

Any classroom is a metaphor for the world. It can teach us the world is hierarchical and rigidly ordered; it can teach that the world is fluid, open, evolving. The classroom teaches us about our relationship to power, to our own agency, to our place in community. In the schools most of us attended, we learned that the world was something like the factories on which our public school system was modeled. We learned that we are essentially individuals, competing with one another. This is the context in which the high school dropout is blamed for “poor choices.” But the one‐room schoolhouse was a community. It had to be. The older students must teach the younger. Students and teachers must learn to get along. They were stuck with each other, in this little world they cannot escape.

It is easy to conceive how we might fall in love with a small community that shares a history and a culture rooted in local ecology and shared stories. But our challenge now is planetary. The Earth is a lot bigger and more diverse than the one‐room schoolhouse or an isolated culture that inhabits an island. But the Earth is also, in some ways, both schoolhouse and island. How can we tell a story that connects us on a planetary scale?

In this book, you'll find a process to empower our young people to reimagine basic assumptions about the world—their story. It is our current story—the story of separation and individualism—that makes us lonely. While I cannot promise an easy solution to every crisis that a community or individual might encounter, I can promise that the solution will be found only if we face our fears and overcome our loneliness. Stories are necessarily created and shared in community; and joy is cultivated in community and intimacy. This can be with other human beings or with non‐humans. Joy is the opposite of, the antidote to, loneliness. And even if our species doesn't survive, wouldn't we want to live more joyfully? Finding joy in such times requires genuine courage.

With a new story, we can begin to see our world, and our crises, in a new, healthy, and holistic way. Moreover, we can work through our personal trauma and loneliness. The new story will put us in context, in relationship, showing us that we are truly in this together. It is then that we can become teachers and leaders in this movement not merely to survive, but to thrive on the Earth. This is easier said than done. It's crucial that we have the right values and context for the new story to emerge.

While we must begin to think globally, we also must act not only locally, but in ways that align with our specific gifts and purpose. Moreover, reducing our problems to legality or politics and personal shopping habits draws a line between other actions that can be just as important. Loneliness is a holistic problem, for it has to do with our lack of relationship; its solutions, therefore, are found in many ways we might find surprising. We need activists, sure. But we also need better parents and teachers; we need thriving, egalitarian democracies. All this is the ultimate work of education.

***

My hope is that this book offers a pathway to the points above. For many readers, these points will challenge some basic assumptions about our place in the world. For example, one of the basic assumptions this new story must challenge is the notion that our inner lives and our outer problems are separate. “What happens to the outer world happens to the inner world,” writes Thomas Berry (1999). “If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free‐flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.” The seven principles in the next chapter offer approaches to recognizing that we are never truly alone, that we already have access to community in some form, and that we cannot separate our inner and outer lives.

All this is to say that our crisis is an educational one. But only in the very broadest sense. This isn't merely about what happens in schools. It is about how the cosmos itself is the very context for learning, and about how we learn to live and grow and learn together in community.

What I cannot promise in this book is a clear vision for what lies beyond. Like the earliest humans sitting around the fire, we are putting together a new world in story and symbol in order to survive and thrive in uncertain times.

Our Paleolithic ancestors can teach us something else, too. The ancient shamans of early human cultures climbed deep into the caves in which they lived and drew on the walls. The images of the cave paintings tell us so much about their world, their minds, their stories. First, they drew the images of predator and prey, the other living creatures on whom their survival depended. They understood deeply—not scientifically, but as part of their shared story—how interrelated they were to other living beings. The images they drew were reflections of the night sky and the constellations they perceived through both imagination and observation, an intersection of their interior lives and the cosmos itself.

The other image on the walls of the cave was the handprint. I can remember, still, when my wife was pregnant with our first child, seeing the little hand pushing out on the edge of the womb, her world. I remembered the caves at Altamira that I'd visited years before. I realized then that these ancient shamans saw themselves in the womb of the Earth, ready to be born. They, like us, like my unborn daughter, couldn't possibly have imagined what was coming next.

These caves can be thought of as the first classrooms, at once the human soul and cosmos, a space for inner work and creative expression. For the earliest humans, the microcosm represented a story that represented their world. So what does the classroom of today's world look like? What are the values of our new world and what is our place in it? It is with consideration of this question that we begin the next chapter.