Dear Nancy, This is a great quote. Wondering if you can see some intersections pairs of Joy and Need, either in your own life or in other people's life. My own example's don't see so sure footed -an online team building an iPhone App for putting healthy behaviors into your ordinary world -helping a friend build a new piece on his career One inspiration for profound creativity for me is Twyla Tharpe, both her book on creativity and also this clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTQ64Y9V4xY where she describes the process of taking a small piece of personal history and making a new dance I also like this clip of Seva Gandhi who helped design the Service Learning Program which she describes and is now leading 40 Interns in a peer learning project in ICA's Accelerate Chicago program. You can see a fragment here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ1K1rt7opQ. What I like about the program is it is for 20 Somethings picking a place and rolling up their sleeves. There are plenty of old-timers around but the 20 Somethings seem well trained and fearless. Also not so sure about earth; seems like a little loving kindness and compassion for sentient beings is good too Dear Ones, When I read Jan's comments this morning, Thomas Berry's quote came up - for me it begins to come close to a divine calling ...perhaps EARTH could be stretched to all my relations, the universe, life .... " MY GREAT WORK IS WHERE MY OWN GREAT JOY INTERSECTS WITH EARTH'S GREAT NEED" ... With love and gratitude for my colleagues who continue to raise the QUESTION (s) .... Nancy -- Steve Harrington