This is the story of an adventurous life of pushing limits to expand our understanding of ourselves in our universe?as an explorer, as a scientist, as a philosopher, as a political animal, as a mother and grandmother, even as an artist?concluding with the realization that all we have to go on is our stories. This is what most differentiates us from other species, even from our own cells: that we tell each other stories of What, How, and Why Things Are (...) as They Are. We do not live as they do in the eternally Now moment, deeply interconnected within All That Is; rather we live in a mental trajectory from deep past to far future, making up stories about ourselves and everything else, coloring our perceptions with these stories and acting them out. We make them up differently in art, science, politics, economics, religion, and whatever, but however much we insist they are truths, they remain the more or less plausible human stories by which we necessarily live our lives individually and collectively. (shrink)