There are few people in this world I admire more than Wade Davis. Anthropologist, adventurer and National Geographic Explorer in Residence, Davis embodies a truly organic vision of humanity. Throughout his career, he has encountered the world’s forgotten cultures, gleaned their knowledge and tried to share it with us. In doing so, he has captured the true essence of what it means to be human. Here are some thoughts from his book The Wayfinders:

One of the intense pleasures of travel is the opportunity to live amongst people’s who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that, in the Amazon, Jaguar shaman still journey beyond the Milky Way, that the myths of the Inuit still resonate with meaning. That the Buddhists in Tibet still pursue the Breath of the Dharma is to remember the central revelation of anthropology: the idea that the social world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of intellectual and spiritual choices that our particular lineage made, however successfully, many generations ago.