Let Your Life Speak...

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Parker J. Palmer)

Chapter One: Listening to Life
...the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. (p2)
"Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent." (p3)
There may be moments in life when we are so unformed that we need to use values like an exoskeleton to keep us from collapsing. But something is very wrong if such moments recur often in adulthood. Trying to live someone else's life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail - and may even do great damage. (p4)
...if the self seeks not pathology byt wholeness...then the fillful pursuit of focation is an acto of violence toward ourselves... (p4)
True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding our lives in check until we honour its truth. (p4)
Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. (p4)
...Latin for "voice". Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. (p4)
...everyone has a life that is different from the "I" of daily consciousness, a life that is trying to live through the "I" who is its vessel. (p5)
...there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self. (p5) [Duality]
We have a strange conceit in our culture that simply because we have said something, we understand what it means! But often we do not - especially when we speak from a deeper place than intellect or ego, speak the kind of words that arise when the inner teacher feels safe enough to tell its truth. At those moments, we need to listen to what our lives are saying and take notes on it, lest we forget our own truth or deny that we ever heard it. (p6)
An inevitable though often ignored dimension of the quest for "wholeness" is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of. (p6,7)
The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. (p7)

Chapter Two: Now I Become Myself
A Vision of Vocation
Now I become myself.
It's taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces.... (May Sarton) (p9)
What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity - the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation. (p9)
...not as a goal to be achieved but as a gif to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice "in here" calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God. (p10)
...birthright gift of self. (p10)
Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'" (p11)
...we all arrive in this world with gifts and as a gift... (p11)
Biblical faith calls it the image of God in which we are all created. Thomas Merton calls it true self. Quakers call it the inner light, or "that of God" in every person. The humanist tradition calls it identity and integrity. No matter what you call it, it is a pearl of great price. (p11) [inner necessity; my self]
...remember who you were when you first arrived and reclaim the gift of true self." (p12)
We arrive in this world with birthright gifts - then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them. (p12)
Then - if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss - we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed. (p12)
[I have always observed, not participated. I have always created (art, writing).]
When we lose track of true self, how can we pick up the trail? One way is to seek clues in stories from our younger years, years when we lived closer to our birthright gifts. (p13)
[I've been 'writing' stories since I before I knew how to print.]
From the beginning, our lives lay down clues to selfhood and vocation, though the clues may be hard to decode. But trying to interpret them is profoundly worthwhile - especially when we are in our twnties or thirties or forties, feeling profoundly lost, having wandered, or been dragged, far away from our birthright gifts. (p15)
...we do not find our callings by conforming ourselves to some abstract moral code. We find our callings by claiming authentic selfhood, by being who we are, by dwelling in the world as Ausya rather than straining to be Moses. The deepest vocational question is not "What ought I to do with my life?" It is the more lemental and demanding "Who am I? What is my nature?" (p15)
Everything in the universe has a nature, which means limits as well as potentials... (p15)
If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. "Faking it" in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one's nature, and it will always fail. (p16)
Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks - we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." (p16) [Beautiful. Music. Art. Writing. My kids...?]
...the deep joy of knowing that we are here on earth to be the gifts that God created. (p17)
...this emphasis on gladness and selfhood is not selfish. The Quaker teacher Douglas Steere was fond of saying that the anscient human question "Who am I?" leads inevitably to the equally important question "Whose am I?" - for there is no selfhood outside of relationship. (p17)
Only when I know both seed and system, self and community, can I embody the great commandment to love both my neighbour and myself. (p17)
Journey Into Darkness
...pilgrimage - "a transformative journey to a sacred centre" full of hardships, darkness, and peril. (p18)
...those hardships are seen not as accidental but as integral to the journey itself. (p18)
Darkness is not the whole of the story - every pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy - but it is the part of the story most often left untold. When we finally escape the darkness and stumble into the light, it is tempting to tell others that our hope never flagged, to deny those long nights we spent cowering in fear. (p18)
...how one's values can do battle with one's heart. (p20)
...native way of being in the world. (p21)
...we are led to truth by our weaknesses as well as our strengths. (p22)
[I am not a white, middle-class male, but I am bent towards autonomous living.]
Vocation at its deepest level is not, "Oh, boy, do I want to go to this strange place where I have to learn a new place to live and where no one, including me, understand what I'm doin." Vocation at its deepest level is, "This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling." (p25)
Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations - projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves - and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits. (p29)
Selfhood, Society, and Service
...self-care is never a selfish act - it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do so not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch. (p30,31)
There are at least two ways to understand the link between selfhood and service. One is offered by the poet Rumi in his piercing observation: "If you are here unfaithfully with us, you're causing terrible damage." If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract a price from others. We will make promises we cannot keep, build houses from flimsy stuff, conjure dreams that devolve into nightmares, and other people will suffer - if we are unfailthful to true self. (p31)
...a more inspiring way of understanding the link between selfhood and service is to study the lives of people who have been here faithfully with us. (p31)
What we see is simple but often ignored: the movements that transform us, our relations, and our world emerge from the lives of people who decide to care for their authentic selfhood. (p31)
...the people who plant the seeds of movements make a critical decision: they decide to live "divided no more." They decide no longer to act on the outside in a way that contradicts some truth about themselves that they hold deeply on the inside. They decide to claim authentic selfhood and act it out - and their decisions ripple out to transform the society in which they live, serving the selfhood of millions of others. (p32)
"I will no longer act on the outside in a way that contradicts the truth that I hold deeply on the inside. I will no longer act as if I were less than the whole person I know myself inwardly to be." (p33)
Where do people find the courage to live divided no more when they know they will be punished for it? (p34)
...no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment. (p34)
The punishment imposed on us for claiming true self can never be worse than the punishment we impose on ourselves by failing to make that claim. And the converse is true as well: no reward anyone might give us could possibly be greater than the reward that comes from living by our own best lights. (p34)
Some journeys are direct, and some are circuitous; some are heroic, and some are fearful and muddled. But every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place were our deep gladness meets the world's deep need. (p36)
As May Sarton reminds us, the pilgrimage toward true self will take "time, many years and places." The world needs people with the patience and the passion to make that pilgrimage not only for their own sake but also as a social and political act. The world still waits for the truth that will set us free - my truth, your truth, our truth - the truth that was seeded in the earth when each of us arrived here formed in the image of God. Cultivating that truth, I believe, is the authentic vocation of every human being. (p36)

Chapter Three: When Way Closes
Way Will Open
...there is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does - maybe more. (p39)
Learning Our Limits
...sometimes the "shoulds" do not work because the life one is living runs crosswise to the grain of one's soul. (p41)
Each of us arrives here with a nature, which means both limits and potentials. We can learn as much about our nature by running into our limits as by experiencing our potentials. (p41,42)
...two kinds of limitations: those that come with selfhood and those that are imposed by people or political forces hell-bent on keeping us "in our place." (p42)
...when I consistently refuse to take no for an answer, I miss the vital clues to my identity that arise when way closes - and I am more likely both to exceed my limits and to do harm to others in the process. (p43)
The Ecology of a Life
...I cannot be or do whatever I desire... (p44)
Our created natures make us like organisms in an ecosystem: there are some roles and relationships in which we thrive and others in which we wither and die. (p44)
If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact that I am exceeding my limits will eventually have consequences. I will distort myself, the other, and our relationship - and may end up doing more damage than if I had never set out to do this particular "good." When I try to do something that is not in my nature or the nature of the relationship, way will close behind me. (p47)
...when we reach the limits of our own capacity to love, community means trusting that someone else will be available to the person in need. (p49)
One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess - the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: if merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place. (p49)
The God of Reality
The God I know does not ask us to conform to some abstract norm for the ideal self. God asks us only to honour our created nature, which means our limits as well as potentials. When we fail to do so, reality happens - God happens - and way closes behind us. (p50)
...the source of reality rather than morality, the source of what is rather than what ought to be. (p50)
Reality - including one's own - is divine, to be not defied but honoured. (p51)
...limitations and liabilities are the flip side of our gifts, (p52)
Turning Around to Discover the World
When I resist way closing rather than taking guidance from it, I may be ignoring the limitations inherent in my nature - which dishonours true self no less than ignoring the potentials I received as birthright gifts. (p53,54)
As Ruth taught me, there is as much guidance in way that closes behind us as there is in way that opens ahead of us. The opening may reveal our potentials while the closing may reveal our limits - two sides of the same coin, the coin called identity. In the spiritual domain, identity is coin of the realm, and we can learn much about our identity by examining either side of the coin. (p54)
...each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up. (p54)
The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality. (p54)
If we are to live our lives fully and well, we must learn to embrace the opposites, to live in a creative tension between our limits and our potentials. We must honour our limitations in ways that do not distort our nature, and we must trust and use our gifts in ways that fulfill the potentials God gave us. We must take the no of the way that closes and find the guidance it has to offer - and take the yes of the way that opens and respond with the yes of our lives. (p55) [Duality]

Chapter Four: All the Way Down
A Personal Preface
The Mystery of Depression
...it is important to speak one's truth to a depressed person. (p59)
...depression demands that we reject simplistic answers, both "religious" and "scientific," and learn to embrace mystery, soemthing our culture resists. Mystery surrounds every deep experience of the human heart: the deeper we go into the heart's darkness or its light, the closer we get to the ultimate mystery of God. (p60)
Embracing the mystery of depression does not mean passivity or resignation. It means moving into a field of forces that seems alien but is in fact one's deepest self. It means waiting, watching, listening, suffering, and gathering whatever self-knowledge one can - and then making choices based on that knowledge, no matter how difficult. One begins the slow walk back to health by choosing each day things that enliven one's selfhood and resisting things that do not. (p60)
The knowledge I amt alking about is not intellectual and analytical but integrative and of the heart, and the choices that lead to wholeness are not pragmatic and calculated, intended to achieve some goal, but simply and profoundly expressive of personal truth. It is a demanding path, for which no school prepares us. (p60,61)
From the Outside Looking In
Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection - it deprives one of the relatedness that is the lifeline of every living being. (p61)
Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection, not just between people but between one's mind and one's feelings. (p62)
Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection, not only between people, and between mind and heart, but between one's self-image and public mask. (p62)
Disconnection may be hell, but it is better than false connections. (p62)
One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to "fix" it, to siply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery. Standing there, we feel useless and powerless, which is exactly how a depressed person feels - and our unconscious need as Job's comforters is to reassure ourselves that we are not like the sad soul before us. (p63)
In an effort to avoid those feelings, I give advice, which sets me, not you, free. If you take my advice, you may get well - and if you don't get well, I did the best I could. If you fail to take my advice, there is nothing more I can do. Either way, I get relief by distancing myself from you, guilt free. (p63)
[To stand in the gap To hold that duality To maintain connection]
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke says, "love... consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other." (p64) [Friendship relationship]
This kind of love does not reflect the "functional atheism" we sometimes practice - saying pious words about God's presence in our lives but believing, on the contrary, that nothing good is going to happen unless we make it happen. Rilke describes a kind of love that neither avoids nor invades the soul's suffering. It is a love in which we represent God's love to a suffering person, a God who does not "fix" us but gives us strength by suffering with us. By standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of another's solitude, we may mediate the love of God to a person who needs something deeper than any human being can give. (p64)
From the Inside Looking Out
The problem with living at high altitude is simple: when we slip, as we always do, we have a long, long way to fall, and the landing may well kill us. the grace of being pressed down to the ground is also simple: when we slip and fall, it is usually not fatal, and we can get back up. (p66)
The Way to God is Down
...Tillich's description of God as the "ground of being." (p69)
...the way to God is not up but down. (p69)
...the self is not set apart or special or superior but is a common mix of good and evil, darkness and light; a place where we can finally embrace the humanity we share with others. That is the best image I can offer not only of the underground but also of the field of forces surrounding the experience of God. (p69,70) [Duality]
The spiritual journey is full of paradoxes. One of them is that the humiliation that brings us down - down to ground on which it is safe to stand and to fall - eventually takes us to a firmer and fuller sense of self. (p70)
Florida Scott Maxwell... "You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done... you are fierce with reality." (p70)
...embracing one's wholeness makes life more demanding - because once you do that, you must live your whole life. (p71)

Chapter Five: Leading From Within
Back to the World
...go past ego toward true self - and you end up not lost in narcissism but returning to the world, bearing more gracefully the responsibilities that come with being human. (p73)
...if it is true that we are made for community, then leadership is everyone's vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads. (p74)
Authentic leaders in every setting - from families to nation-states - aim at liberating the heart, their own and others', so that its powers can liberate the world. (p76)
We capitalists have a long and crippling legacy of believing in the power of external realities much more deeply than we believe in the power of the inner life. (p77)
How many times have you worked in systems based on the belief that the only changes that matter are the ones you can measure or count? (p77)
We can make choices about what we are going to project, and with those choices we help grow the world that is. Consciousness precedes being: consciousness, yours and mine, can form, deform, or reform our world. Our commplicity in world making is a source of awesome and sometimes painful responsibility - and a source of profound hope for change. IT is the ground of our common call to leadership, the truth that makes leaders of us all. (p78)
Shadows and Spirituality
A leader is someone with the power to project either shadow or light onto some part of the world and onto the lives of the people who dwell there. A leader shapes the ethos in which others must live, an ethos as light-filled as heaven or as shadowy as hell. A good leader is intensely aware of the interplay of inner shadow and light, lest the act of leadership do more harm than good. (p78)
...by failing to look at our shadows, we feed a dangerous delusion that leaders too often indulge: that our efforts are always well intended, our power is always benign, and the problem is always in those difficult people whom we are trying to lead! (p79)
Leaders need not only the technical skills to manage the external world but also the spiritual skills to journey inward toward the source of both shadow and light. (p79)
...two crucial features of any spiritual journey. ...it will take us inward and downward, toward the hardest realities of our lives, rather than outward and upward toward abstraction, idealization, and exhortation. The spiritual journey runs counter to the power of positive thinking. (p80)
Why must we go in and down? Because as we do so, we will meet the darkness that we carry within ourselves - the ultimate source of the shadows that we project onto other people. If we do not understand that the enemy is within, we will find a thousand ways of making someone "out there" into the enemy, becoming leaders who oppress rather than liberate others. (p80)
Good leadership comes from people who have penetrated their own inner darkness and arrived at the place where we are at one with one another, people who can lead the rest of us to a place of "hidden wholeness" because they have been there and know the way. (p80,81)
It is so much easier to deal with the external world, to spend our lives manipulating material and institutions and other poeple instead of dealing with our own souls. We like to talk about the outer world as if it were infinitely complex and demanding, but it is a cakewalk compared to the labyrinth of our inner lives! (p82)
On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is in and through. (p85)
Out of the Shadow and Into the Light

1. The first shadow-casting monster is insecurity about identity and worth. Many leaders have an extroverted personality that makes this shadow hard to see. But extroversion sometimes develops as a way to cope with self-doubt: we plunge into external activity to prove that we are worthy - or simply to evade the question. There is a well-known form of this syndrome, especially among men, in which our identity becomes so dependent on performing some external role that we become depressed, and even die, when that role is taken away.
   When we are insecure about our own identities, we create settings that depreive other people of their identities as a way of buttressing our own. This happens all the time in families, where parents who do not like themselves give their children low self-esteem. It happens at work as well: how often I phone a business or professional office and hear, "Dr. Jones's office - this is Nancy speaking." The boss has a title and a last name but the person (usually a woman) who answers the phone has neither, because the boss has decreed that it will be that way.
   There are dynamics in all kinds of institutions that deprive the many of their identity so the few can enhance their own, as if identity were a zero-sum game, a win-lose situation. Look into a classroom, for example, where an insecure teacher is forcing students to be passive stenographers of the teacher's store of knowledge, leaving the teacher with more sense of selfhood and the vulnerable students with less. Or look in on a hospital where the doctors turn patients into objects - "the kidney in Room 410" - as a way of claiming superiority at the very time when vulnerable patients desperately need a sense of self.
   Things are not always this way, of course. There are settings and institutions led by people whose identities do not depend on depriving others of theirs. If you are in that kind of family or office or school or hospital, your sense of self is enhanced by leaders who know who they are.
   These leaders possess a gift available to all who take an inner journey: the knowledge that identity does not depend on the role we play or the power it gives us over others. It depends only on the simple fact that we are children of God, valued in and for ourselves. When a leader is grounded in that knowledge, what happens in the family, the office, the classroom, the hospital can be life-giving for all concerned.
2. A second shadow inside many of us is the belief that the universe is a battleground, hostile to human interests. Notice how often we use images of warfare as we go about our work, especially in organizations. We talk about tactics and strategies, allies and enemies, wins and losses, "do or die." If we fail to be fiercely competitive, the imagery suggests, we will surely lose, because the world we live in is essentially a vast combat zone.
   Unfortunately, life is full of self-fulfilling prophecies. The tragedy of this inner shadow, our fear of losing a fight, is that it helps create conditions where people feel compelled to live as if they were at war. Yes, the world is competitive, but largely because we make it so. Some of our best institutions, from corporations to change agencies to schools, are learning that there is another way of doing business, a way that is consensual, cooperative, communal: they are fulfilling a different prophecy and creating a different reality.
   The gift we receive on the inner journey is the insight that the universe is working together for good. The structure of reality is not the structure of a battle. Reality is not out to get anybody. Yes, there is death, but it is part of the cycle of life, and when we learn to move gracefully with that cycle, a great harmony comes into our lives. The spiritual truth that harmony is more fundamental than warfare in the nature of reality itself could transform this leadership shadow - and transform our institutions as well.
3. A third shadow common among leaders is "functional atheism," the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen - a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God.
   This shadow causes pathology on every level of our lives. It leads us to impose our will on others, stressing our relationships, sometimes to the point of breaking. It often eventuates in burnout, depression, and espair, as we learn that the world will not bend to our will and we become embittered about that fact. Functional atheism is the shadow that drives collective frenzy as well. It explains why the saverage group can tolerate no more than fifteen seconds of silence: if we are not making noise, we believe, nothing good is happening and something must be dying.
   The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that ours is not the only act in town. Not only are there other acts out there, but some of them are even better than ours, at least occasionally! We learn that we need not carry the whole load but can share it with others, liberating us and empowering them. We learn that sometimes we are free to lay the load down altogether. The great community asks us to do only what we are able and trust the rest to other hands.
4. A fourth shadow within and among us is fear, especially our fear of the natural chaos of life. Many of us - parents and teachers and CEOs - are deeply devoted to eliminating all remnants of chaos from the world. We want to organize and orchestrate things so thoroughly that messiness will never bubble up around us and threaten to overwhelm us (for "messiness" read dissent, innovation, challenge, and change). In families and churches and corporations, this shadow is projected as rigidity of rules and procedues, creating and ethos that is imprisoning rather than empowering. (Then, of course, the mess we must deal with is the prisoners trying to break out!)
   The insight we receive on the inner journey is that chaos is the precondition to creativity: as every creation myth has it, life itself emerged from the void. Even what has been created needs to be returned to chaos from time to time so that it can be regenerated in more vital form. When a leader fears chaos so deeply as to try to eliminate it, the shadow of death will fall across everything that leader approaches - for the ultimate answer to all of life's messiness is death.
5. My final example of the shadows that leaders project is, paradoxically, the denial of death itself. Though we sometimes kill things off well before their time, we also live in denial of the fact that all things must die in due course. Leaders who participate in this denial often demand that the people around them keep resuscitating things that are no longer alive. Projects and programs that should have been unplugged long ago are keep on life support to accommodate the insecurities of a leader who does not want anything to die on his or her watch.
   Within our denial of death lurks fear of another sort: the fear of failure. In most organizations, failure means a pink slip in your box, even if that failure, that "little death," was suffered in the service of high purspose. It is interesting that science, so honoured in our culture, seems to have transcended this particular fear. A good scientist does not fear the death of a hypothesis, because that "failure" clarifies the steps that need to be taken toward truth, sometimes more than a hypothesis that succeeds. The best leaders in every setting reward people for taking worthwhile risks even if they are likely to fail. These leaders know that the death of an intitiative - if it was tested for good reasons - is always a source of new learning.
   The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that death finally comes to everything - and yet death does not have the final word. By allowing something to die when its time is due, we create the conditions under which new life can emerge. (p86,87,88,89,90,91)
   

Inner Work in Community
Can we help each other deal with the inner issues inherent in leadership? We can, and I believe we must. Our frequent failure as leaders to deal with our inner lives leaves too many individuals and institutions in the dark. From the family to the corporation to the body politic, we are in trouble partly because of the shadows I have named. Since we can't get out of it, we must get into it - by helping each other explore our inner lives. (p91)
...lift up the value of "inner work." (p91)
...inner work is as real as outer work and involves skills one can develop, skills like journaling, reflective reading, spiritual friendship, meditation, and prayer. (p91)
...inner work, though it is a deeply personal matter, is not necessarily a private matter: inner work can be helped along in community. (p92)
...doing inner work together is a vital counterpoint to doing it alone. Left to our own devices, we may delude ourselves in ways that others can help us correct. (p92)
The key to this form of community involves holding a paradox - the paradox of having relationships in which we protect each other's aloneness. We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul, that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other, that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonouring its mystery, never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs. (p92,93) [Duality]
...remind each other of the dominant role that fear plays in our lives, of all the ways that fear forecloses the potentials... (p93)
...all of the world's wisdom traditions address the fact of fear... (p93)
Everyone has fear, and people who embrace the call to leadership often find fear abounding. (p93)
...we do not need to be the fear we have, We do not have to lead from a place of fear, thereby engendering a world in which fear is multiplied. (p94)
We have plac4es of fear inside of us, but we have other places as well - places with names like trust and hope and faith. We can choose to lead from one of those places, to stand on ground that is not riddled with the fault lines of fear, to move toward others from a place of promise instead of anxiety. As we stand in one of those places, fear may remain close at hand and our spirits may still tremble. But now we stand on ground that will support us, ground from which we can lead others toward a more trustworthy, more hopeful, more faithful way of being in the world. (p94)

Chapter Six: There is a Season [This whole chapter - "Every Season" (Nichole Nodeman)]
From Language to Life
Our lives participate in the myth of eternal return: we circle around and spiral down, never finally answering the questions "Who am I?" and "Whose am I?" but, in the words of Rilke, "living the questions" throughout our lives. (p95)
Metaphors are more than literary devices, of course: most of us use metaphors, albeit unconsciously, to name our experience of life. But these personal metaphors do much more than describe reality as we know it. Animated by the imagination, one of the most vital powers we possess, our metaphors often become reality, transmuting themselves from language into the living of our lives. (p96)
The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all - and to find in all of it opportunities for growth. (p96)
If we accept the notion that our lives are dependent on an inexorable cycle of seasons, on a play of powers that we can conspire with but never control, we run headlong into a culture that insists, against all evidence, that we can make whatever kind of life we want, whenever we want it. Deeper still, we run headlong into our own egos, which want desperately to believe that we are always in charge. (p97)
We need to challenge and reform these distortions of culture and ego - reform them toward ways of thinking and doing and being that are rooted in respect for the living ecology of life. (p97)
We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed. (p97)
We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth. (p98)
Autumn
This hopeful notion that living is hidden within dying is surely enhanced by the visual glories of autumn. What artist would ever have painted a season of dying with such a vivid palette if nature had not done it first? Does death possess a beauty that we - who fear death, who find it ugly and obscene - cannot see? How shall we understand autumn's testimony that death and elegance go hand in hand?
For me, the words that come closest to snswering those questions are the words of Thomas Merton: "There is in all visible things... a hidden wholeness." In the visible world of nature, a great truth is concealed in plain sight: diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites. They are held together in the paradox of "hidden wholeness." (p99)
In a paradox, opposites do not negate each - they cohere in mysterious unity at the heart of reality. (p99)
But in a culture that prefers the ease of either-or thinking to the complexities of paradox, we have a hard time holding opposites together. We want light iwthout darkness, the glories of spring and summer without the demands of autumn and winter... (p100) [Duality]
Split off from each other, neither darkness nor light is fit for human habitation. But if we allow the paradox of darkness and light to be, the two will conspire to bring wholeness and health to every living thing. (p100) [Holding duality]
...daily dyings are necessary precursors to new life. (p100)
...when I yield to the endless interplay of living and dying, dying and living, the life I am given will be real and colourful, fruitful and whole. (p100)
Winter
Winter here is a demanding season - and not everyone appreciates the discipline. It is a season when death's victory can seem supreme: few creatures stire, plants do not visibly grow, and nature feels like our enemy. And yet the rigors of winter, like the diminishments of autumn, are accompanied by amazing gifts.
One gift is beauty, different from the beauty of autumn but somehow lovelier still: I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow. Another gift is the reminder that times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things. Despite all appearances, of course, nature is not dead in winter - it has gone underground to renew itself and prepare for spring. Winter is a time when we are admonished, and even inclined, to do the same for ourselves.
But for me, winter has an even greater gift to give. It comes when the sky is clear, the sun is brilliant, the trees are bare, and first snow is yet to come. It is the gift of utter clarity. In winter, one can walk into woods that had been opaque with summer growth only a few months earlier and see the trees clearly, singly and together, and see the ground they are rooted in. (p101)
Winter clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to see the very ground of our being. (p102)
...a daily walk into the winter world will fortify the spirit by taking you boldly to the very heart of the season you fear. (p102)
Until we enter boldly into the fears we most want to avoid, those fears will dominate our lives. But when we walk directly into them - protected from frostbite by the warm garb of friendship or inner discipline or spiritual guidance - we can learn what they have to teach us. Then we discover once again that the cycle of the seasons is trustworthy and life-giving, even in the most dismaying season of all. (p103)
Spring
...before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. (p103)
...the conditions for rebirth are being created. (p103)
...the word humus - the decayed vegetable matter that feeds the rood of plants - comes from the same root that gives rise to the word humility. It is a blessed etymology. (p103)
...the humiliating events of life,... may create the fertile soil in which something new can grow. (p103)
Spring in its fullness is not easy to write about. Late spring is so flamboyant that it caricatures itself, which is why it has long been the province of poets with more passion than skill. But perhaps those poets have a point. Perhaps we are meant to yield to this flamboyance, to understand that life is not always to e measured and meted as winter compels us to do but to be spent from time to time in a riot of colour and growth.
Late spring is potlatch time in the natural world, a great giveaway of blooming beyond all necessity and reason - done, it would appear, for no reason other than the sheer joy of it. The gift of life, which seemed to be withdrawn in winter, has been given once again, and nature, rather than hoarding it, gives it all away. There is another paradox here, known in all the wisdom traditions: if you receive a gift, you keep it alive not by clinging to it but by passing it along. (p104,105)
...if we want to save our lives, we cannot cling to them but must spend them with abandon. (p105) [Carpe diem]
Summer
...summer is a steady state of plenty, a green and amber muchness that feeds us on more levels than we know. (p106)
...nature normally takes us through a reliable cycle of scarcity and abundance in which times of deprivation foreshadow an eventual return to the bountiful fields. (p106)
It is difficult to trust that the pool of possibilities is bottomless, that one can keep diving in and finding more. (p107)
...by embracing the scarcity assumption, we create the very scarcities we fear. (p107)
In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together to celebrate and share our common store. Whether the scarce resource is money or love or power or words, the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around. Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them - and receive them from others when we are in need. (p107,108)
Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole. Community doesn't just create abundance - community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed. (p108)
Summer is the season when all the promissory notes of autumn and winter and spring come due, and each year the debts are repaid with compound interest. (p109)
Summer is a reminder that our faith is not nearly as strong as the things we profess to have faith in - a reminder that for this single season, at least, we might cease our anxious machinations and give ourselves to the abiding and abundant grace of our common life. (p109)



And the Father says to you, Janna, that you’re in a time and a season when things are changing; when things are moving; when things are being reinterpreted around your life.

I have noticed this... it is heartening and, at the same time, disconcerting. I never have liked change. Even when I like the end result, change is scary and disturbing.

There’s something new and fresh that the Father wants to give to you, Janna. There’s new experiences. Deepening. A broadening.

I wonder if this has to do with all of this blog - the hermiting, the exploration, the learning and becoming of self and faith...?

There’s things the Father has for you that you haven’t received and haven’t fully unpacked. It’s almost like there’s containers and boxes and things around you that are still waiting to be unpacked. There’s things that the Father wants to give to you, that will give you life and truth and understanding and reference points that will be helpful for you. There’s this counsel and wisdom that the Father wants to speak into your life, that will help to interpret and reinterpret some things for you. The Lord says there’s things coming that will bring clarity and great reflective understanding back to you.

I feel this, deep inside. This is part of the becoming, part of the learning, part of the knowing. Opening the gift, accepting the gift, receiving the gift... that is difficult. But it is possible.

You like reflection, Janna. You like reflective relationships. You like to do things that build clear communication. You like to be very honest and open; you like to be deep, and you like to be clear in understanding motivation, intentions, agendas, and things that are important in relationships.

I do like reflection. That is the point of this blog. It is the point of journaling: to reflect on my life, on life events, and to make sense of that which needs unravelling.

You’re a woman that’s got a lot of relationship skills, good people skills, good communication equipment in your life that the Father wants you to use to communicate His love, His truth, and His life to others.

I feel this in the becoming. It is wrenching and twisting and uncertain, but it is solid and based in Truth. Honesty is tearing but necessary...

There’s many things that the Father wants to speak and communicate to your heart. And the Father says, “I am walking and waiting and nurturing you to come into a place when there’s a greater processing, a greater receiving, a greater ability for you to understand and to come into that which is yours in God.”

He has brought me here, to this place I am right now, for this purpose. He is teaching me, becoming me, growing me into that which I truly am.

There’s a lot of inheritance – a lot of spiritual inheritance and giftedness that the Father wants to put upon you.

That is frightening, when my family history is taken into account. There is much in our past that points to great responsibility and heavy destiny - for each of us. Are we ready to take that on?

And, Janna, he wants to just – it’s almost like the misting rain, the mist that comes with a very green and fertile environment. The Father says you do very well in very green and fertile environments when there’s a lot of support, a lot of strength, a lot of structure around you that gives to you a lot of momentum and helps to build and create out of your life the truth that can set many people free.

This is part of who I am, I know it... I feel it. Someone who speaks Truth into the lives of others.