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 as a way of calming our souls and imparting a bit of safety, if only

in theory.

Sometimes even crowds of people in 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 threatened

to cut us off from the world around us we discovered fire and then electrical lights.

Today we use technology 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, then ancient cultures, you know the

days before Facebook or even 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 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, they put

us in our place, they offered perspective, it might seem like we're at the top of the

food chain but what if we're not?

From the ancient hills of Iceland and Brazil to the black top streets of urban America, our

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