Every person, in the course of his life, must build - starting with the natural territory of his own self - a work, an opus, into which something enters from
all the elements of the earth. He makes his soul throughout all his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world.
from The Divine Milieu (1957), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
