Read Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★
In Yupik, a language spoken by the Inuit along the Bering Sea, there is Ellam Yua: a kind of spiritual debt to the natural world, or a way of moving through that world with some measure of generosity, of grace, or a way of living that acknowledges the soul of another human being, or the soul of a rock or of a piece of driftwood; sometimes translated as soul, or as God, but meaning neither. In a Mayan language, K’iche, there is the Nawal: one’s spiritual essence but separate from the self; one’s other, not exactly an alter ego or merely an avatar but a protective spirit that cannot be summoned.
And
How deep in our genes is the longing for flight embedded? We always were a species of nomads. Eli found it easy to imagine an instinct passed down generation to generation, a permanently thrown breaker on a genetic switchboard: flight or fight, and a switch jammed permanently in the flight position, the limitless longing for travel pulled down by hooked genes.