Thank you for a beautiful, richly insightful essay on coping with our shared predicament. I don’t have any easy answers to the perennial mysteries of impermanence as it relates to our keenly felt awareness of our unique self and the primordial horror of losing it. But as a practicing Buddhist, I take refuge in the essential truth of interbeing—Thich Nhat Hanh’s coinage for the core Buddhist understanding of Prattitya Samutpada, or codependent origination, which can be summed up in the simple statement, “This is because that is.” Without all the causes and conditions that led to our human birth—from the Big Bang to the mysterious origin of life on Earth to the equally mysterious evolution of human language and self-awareness…all the way down to my parents having sex that worked, some time in late January of 1949, I would not exist. And when my body finally collapses, That same “I” will cease to exist. But Gaia and the universe from which I arose will continue to follow its own evolutionary path, as our unknowable but intimate God wills…The Buddhist conclusion to all of this is that the separate self is just a mental formation, a convenient illusion conjured up by our immune system and then reified by our language to enable us to stay alive, socially interact, and play our part in the impermanent pageant of life, as God wills…what is true for me is also true for our global industrial civilization and the specific conditions of the Biosphere—of Gaia—that have thus far nurtured us, but which, due to our greed, ignorance, and folly, will soon jettison us like the parasites we have become. Our only hope is that a saving remnant of our descendants develop the resilience to seed a whole new culture that is symbiotic with, rather than parasitic upon, our biological support system, which Shakespeare wisely called “Great Creating Nature” and I call “Gaia.”