What legacy can a dedicated adventurer, a cosmic snoop, a deep pastist, and futurist leave to her world at the end of a long life? For well over half my 88 Earth turnings, I've been dedicated to the age-old questions of who we humans are, where we've come from, and where we seem to be headed. As an evolution biologist (deep pastist) I eventually realized my science was only one of many sciences we humans developed to answer such questions, each based on a particular worldview, actually on a particular story of How Things Are from microcosm to macrocosm.

Story used to be called fiction, but recently, our rigid boundary between fiction and fact has become very fuzzy and storytelling has gained ground as what distinguishes us from other creatures. It is our way of exchanging our experiences, of forming our realities.

All of us go through life molding our experiences into such stories. This book, then, is the legacy I leave you all, dear readers, a compilation of the experiential stories, many quite magical, which formed my evolving worldview, my VISTA. I wish you all good fortune in evolving yours.