The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage.*

Given the uniqueness of each of us, it should not be surprising that one of the greatest challenges is to inhabit our own individuality and to discover which life-form best expresses it.**
John O’Donohue

Home inventionibus: one who quests.

Within our industrialised systems of education, work and society, there is a distinct possibility that we live well within our boundary lines and heritage.

Our quest, then, is to rediscover these, not only for ourselves, but also for each other.

Here are some words that came together in my reading this morning:

Heroes use systems, they aren’t held back by them.^

Not the usual way we think of heroes. Yes, there’s the danger of watering down the power of heroism, but there is also the possibility of missing the ordinary, often subserve, deeds that people bring into every day.

Oliver Burkeman writes of those who immerse themselves in a hobby:

In an age of instrumentalisation, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no pay-offs in terms of productivity or profit.^^

No productivity!

No profit!

Aaagh!

Philip Newell writes of our quest to rediscover our boundary lines and heritage in nature:

There is hope for the human journey to the extent that we come back into true relationship with the earth’s wildness.^^

Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes of the quest of women to find the wildness of their boundary lines and heritage:

[Women] were kept as fallow gardens … but thankfully there was always wild seed which arrived on the wind.^*

I found myself contemplating this morning’s rising sun as being subversive while it seeped through the trees near my home on an otherwise overcast day: the branches and buds shone like gold. It was on a quest to transform.*^

May you explore to the edges of your boundary lines and goodly heritages, and enable others to rediscover theirs.

*Psalm 16:6;
**From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
^From Seth Godin’s blog: The hospitality systems gap;
^From Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
*^From Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul;
^*From Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves.