Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

by Parker J. Palmer

"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."

The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.

I am less gifted at building on other people's discoveries than at tinkering in my own garage; less gifted at slipping slowly into a subject than at jumping into the deep end to see if I can swim; less gifted at making outlines than at writing myself into a corner and trying to find a way out; less gifted at tracking a tight chain of logic than at leaping from one metaphor to the next!

He's Me

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 soil], that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other, that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery, never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.