Many indigenous peoples share the understanding that we are each endowed with a particular gift, a unique ability. Birds to sing and stars to glitter, for instance. It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility.*
Robin Wall Kimmerer

To this quality of aliveness, the shan-shui artists gave the name zi-ran, which might be translated as “self-ablazement,” “self-thusness” or “wildness.”**
Robert Macfarlane

That thing you love doing – which
interests you so much that you have
invested and sacrificed to hone it
across the span of your life
so that it defines you –
That is what we need;
It is where significance lies:
the future we imagine is just that:
not an alien anything, but what we imagine,
what we can imagine.
And often it’s what we
can’t imagine that we’re most in need of.^

*Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass;
**Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places; the shan-shui are “rivers and mountains;”
^Alan Jacobs’ Breaking Bread With the Dead.