No one likes to be alone.

Even introverts need to come up for air every now and then and experience human contact.

Being around others has a way of calling our souls and imparting a bit of safety, if only

in theory.

And sometimes even crowds of people and scores of friends can't fight the crippling feeling

that we are in the end, isolated and alone.

Humans have become very good at chasing away that feeling though.

When darkness threatens to cut us off from the world around us, we discovered fire and

then electrical lights.

And we use technology today to help us stay connected to friends and relatives who

live thousands of miles away.

And yet the feeling of loneliness grows deeper every year.

We've learned to harness tools to fight it though.

In ancient cultures, in the days before Facebook and the printing press, if you can fathom

that, society fought the feeling of being alone with story.

Each culture developed a set of tales, a mythology and surrounding lore that filled in the

cracks.

These stories explained the unexplainable, they filled the dark night with figures and

shapes, and they gave people lonely or not, something else to talk about, something other.

Some tales were there to teach, some preached morals through analogy, others offered a word

of warning or a lesson that would keep children safe.

In the end though, all of them did something that we couldn't do on our own.

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