The indigenous cultures see themselves as the elder brothers of our world. Their message to their younger brothers: You are destroying the world.

Being positive is healing, but a Pollyanna positivity that ignores the world around you can be as indiscriminate or even damaging as an overdose of the media’s version of news.

What to do, then, when tired of the clamor of opposing viewpoints of individuality vs. global unity?

Seek to understand the truth, first within. Then, when you find its balanced presentation there, look for hidden messages of Truth as both hope and caution in the world around you.

Story telling – found in the world’s mythologies and in today’s cultural reporting of ‘life as a spiritual practice’ – is filled with metaphors. These can help you define your individual relationship with the natural world.

An example of today’s repository of cultural and spiritual diversity can be found in the National Geographic.

Engaged in the storytelling tradition for over a century, National Geographic has been presenting and preserving more than just brilliant visual presentations of the world’s culture.

Through providing vivid visual story, it also presents a layered message: one of global hope through diversity with another of warning.

What can we do to preserve the vanishing cultures of our planet?

This video of a lecture by Wade Davis of National Geographic speaks to that preservation. He asks, “In the end, then, it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony, or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity?”