Joy is a piercing desire, a mystical longing both painful and sweet: a kind of homesickness for a home we scarcely remember.
~ Deborah Smith Douglas, in Weavings XV:4
Consciousness individually and collectively shapes our material world. Our interior life constantly shapes our exterior life. This is why no matter how diverse our work in the external world, the "common work" of humanity —the only true way we can live our external lives — requires becoming conscious of the relationship between our inner and outer lives.