"That summer I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here. That is still my ambition. But now I have come to see that it proposes an enormous labor. It is a spiritual ambition, like goodness. The wild creatures belong to the place by nature, but as a man I can belong only by understanding and by virtue. It is an ambition I cannot hope to succeed in wholly,  but I have come to believe that it is the most worthy of all."

—Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays 1965-1980