"As we’ve surrounded ourselves with more and more possessions, we’ve grown further from the sacredness of the world, and the sacredness of ourselves. As we’ve elevated economic growth and production and consumption to the highest measures of success and purpose, we’ve closed ourselves off from so much of the joy and wonder and belonging that are inherent in us and the world.

We have an opportunity to reorient our lives toward the things that really do matter. An opportunity to slow down, to be present, to hear our deeper callings. An opportunity to shift our attention from “the things we don’t have” or “the things we have to give up,” to so much that we do have. From food and shelter, to our breath, the sky, movement, life.

We have an opportunity to reweave ourselves back into the human community and the family of all living beings, the family of the land and trees, the otters and grasses—to live with them in relationships of respect and wonder.

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We have an opportunity to reclaim ourselves and this world as sacred.

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It is a profound blessing that so many of the changes our current crisis requires are precisely what best serve us. So much of what we must surrender actually impoverishes us—even those of us who have supposedly benefited the most from it. And so much of what we must embrace actually nourishes happiness, abundance, and belonging.

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Indeed, the extensive research that has been done in regards to the sciences of happiness, abundance, and belonging offer a way forward out of this system and its deceptions and poverty, and into entirely different ways of thinking and feeling and living. They are like golden threads we can follow home to the heart of ourselves and the world.

 

That is the journey of this book: to follow these golden threads of happiness, abundance, and belonging, to return home.

 

[1] All facts and quotes in the introduction are cited in the main body of the book."