Questions to Humanity
The Spark of Inquiry · Colleen Powers
Are you experiencing division, unity, or both?
- In your family?
- Your community?
- Your country?
- Between people and beliefs?
- Between humanity and the living Earth?
- Perhaps even within yourself?
What could help us find our way toward one another again?
We live in a time of extraordinary knowledge, extraordinary possibility, and extraordinary division.
What happens when we become curious about why?
Questions to Humanity explores 22 areas of human life through inquiry, from identity, emotion, and belonging to water, food, education, technology, economics, consciousness, cooperation, and our collective future.
It begins with a simple premise: better questions can change what we are able to see.
Why questions?
“Why do people make life harder for each other?”
Years ago, one question kept returning to me. I could not put it down.
That question led to another, and another.
Eventually I found myself questioning the stories we inherit, the systems we create, the way we treat one another, our relationship with Earth, and what kind of future we are building.
I began to wonder whether some of humanity’s biggest problems persist partly because we keep asking the same questions from inside the same ways of thinking.
Questions to Humanity grew from that wondering.
This book does not ask you to agree with me. It asks all of us to become curious.
What happens when we question what we think we know?
Who are you beneath the identities you inherited?
What has your attention?
What is emotion trying to tell us?
What does belonging require?
What would it mean to become good ancestors?
What is clean water worth?
Why do we educate children the way we do?
What does prosperity actually mean?
How is technology changing what it means to be human?
What would cooperation look like at the scale of humanity?
What are we creating together without realizing it?
What kind of world are we leaving behind?
Perhaps the future begins with the questions we are willing to ask.
A guide to 22 questions for self-reflection22 Chapters.
One big conversation.
Questions to Humanity moves from the inner world of the individual to the systems we share, the living Earth, human development, and the future we are creating together.
Each chapter begins with inquiry. There is no required order for curiosity.
Start with the question that finds you.
- IPeople and Mind
- IIEarth and Survival
- IIISociety and Structure
- IVHuman Development
- VVision and Future
Chapter I · The Spark of Inquiry
What question is asking to be lived through me?
Every awakening begins with a single, honest question — the small flame that refuses to be put out.
Chapter II · Awareness and Attention
Where does my attention actually go each day?
To notice the noticing — to see the shape of our own seeing before we try to change it.
Chapter III · Emotion as Guidance
What is this feeling here to teach me?
Emotion as an inner compass — neither enemy nor ornament, but a quiet intelligence asking to be heard.
Chapter IV · Purpose and Meaning
What am I being shaped to do that only I can do?
Purpose is less a destination than a slow remembering of why we came.
Chapter V · Identity, Belonging, and the Need for Community
Who are my people, and how do I show up for them?
We are formed in the company we keep — and the company we still have the courage to seek.
Chapter VI · Creativity and Imagination
What is the world imagining through me right now?
Imagination is not escape. It is the first sketch of the world that is trying to be born.
Chapter I
The Spark of Inquiry
What happens when we become curious again?
Read the opening chapter here, in full, before deciding anything else. It begins with a fogbow, a loss, and the question that would not let go.
The story behind the book
Colleen Powers works with her hands.
She makes art, builds things, grows food, and has raised a family. She has known grief and she has known wonder, sometimes in the same week.
For years she has questioned the systems people take for granted, loved the Earth without apology, and wondered out loud what humanity might become if we gave our curiosity a little more room.
The fuller story, and the loss that set it in motion, waits on the next page.
Questions to Humanity
The Spark of Inquiry
Colleen Powers
Twenty-two chapters exploring some of the oldest and newest questions facing humanity.
- A book to read.
- A book to write in.
- A book to argue with.
- A book to return to.
Today's question
Where are you experiencing division?
What question might open a door?
Questions to Humanity
The Spark of Inquiry