Creatures of belonging

I like how Whyte connects the idea of work and vocation with belonging, and how this innate sense and purpose can be lost, but also, encouragingly, and with no small amount of work, rediscovered - it "beckons" us. He also notes elsewhere that the word desire comes from the Latin de sider 'of the stars' (78), all of which connects in a satisfying way with what I was trying to get at in this post and is precisely what prompted me to want to ask questions of my three-year old self in the sketched portrait.
(Note to self: stop turning over the corners of library book pages.)
Each of us, somewhere in the biography of our childhood, remembers a moment where we felt a portion of the world calling and beckoning to us. We are creatures of belonging, and as our growing consciousness as a child forms we look for the expressions of our belonging in every quarter. Out of this sense of belonging, the world seems to call to us, to recognize us, and to speak to us directly, the voice itself an embodiment of our particular nature and the way that nature finds a home in the world. At best, this conversation between ourselves and the world becomes our work. Sometimes we are able to remember and follow the flow of this conversation, but sometimes as a child we were made to feel powerless by the enclosing adult world, and were bullied into forgetting the horizon it represented. Later, in the middle of the road of our adult lives, in a state of utter forgetfulness, we may wake like Dante, in a dark wood, looking for some inner compass bearing that will steer us to the freedom of that horizon again. The inner compass almost always leads us back toward that childhood we have spent so much time trying to leave behind. We return there not to become a child again but to remember those instinctual joys which filled our imaginations and growing bodies and set our enthusiastic course into the world. There is something trustable about the original enthusiasms of the very young that point directly toward the way we are made. (65)