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Vocation, True Self, & the Inner Journey: “Let Your Life Speak” by Parker J. Palmer (Book Summary)

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Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer is a fantastic book to start your journey toward life purpose.

I wish I would have discovered it five years ago when I started my own journey.

If you’re a Premium Member, there’s a companion post:

🔒 How to Find Your True Self with “Let Your Life Speak” by Parker J. Palmer (+ Infographic)

Sloww Let Your Life Speak Parker Palmer Book

The way that I described my existential crisis is eerily similar to Parker’s own story—all the way down to the fact that we were both in our early thirties and stared at the ceiling for hours every night:

”I was in my early thirties when I began, literally, to wake up to questions about my vocation. By all appearances, things were going well, but the soul does not put much stock in appearances. Seeking a path more purposeful than accumulating wealth, holding power, winning at competition, or securing a career, I had started to understand that it is indeed possible to live a life other than one’s own. Fearful that I was doing just that—but uncertain about the deeper, truer life I sensed hidden inside me, uncertain whether it was real or trustworthy or within reach—I would snap awake in the middle of the night and stare for long hours at the ceiling.” — Parker J. Palmer

Quick Housekeeping:

  • All quotes are from the author unless otherwise stated.
  • I’ve added emphasis (in bold) to quotes throughout this post.
  • This summary is organized by themes I’ve identified (not necessarily by the author’s chapters)

Summary Contents: Click a link to jump to a section below

Sloww Let Your Life Speak Parker Palmer

Vocation, True Self, & the Inner Journey: Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer (Book Summary)

Quick Introduction

It’s not possible to include all of Parker’s life story in this summary. It’s a book worth reading in full. Parker writes in a plain language that is refreshingly honest and immediately resonates. The decades that he’s spent reflecting and discovering himself come through in his writing—and just like his life, he’s stripped out all the fluff.

  • “With the exception of Chapter I, every chapter in this book originally appeared as an essay in some other publication during the past decade. I have rewritten all the essays, most of them substantially. My aim has been to create a real book—not not just a collection of articles about vocation, but a coherent exploration of a subject that engages many of us for the better part of our lives.”
  • “‘Ask me whether what I have done is my life.’ For some, those words will be nonsense, nothing more than a poet’s loose way with language and logic. Of course what I have done is my life! To what am I supposed to compare it? But for others, and I am one, the poet’s words will be precise, piercing, and disquieting. They remind me of moments when it is clear—if I have eyes to see—that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. In those moments I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath the ice. And in the spirit of the poet, I wonder: What am I meant to do? Who am I meant to be?“
  • “The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”
Sloww Soul Wild Animal Parker Palmer

Defining “Let Your Life Speak”

“I ran across the old Quaker saying, ‘Let your life speak.’ I found those words encouraging, and I thought I understood what they meant: ‘Let the highest truths and values guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do.’ Because I had heroes at the time who seemed to be doing exactly that, this exhortation had incarnate meaning for me—it meant living a life like that of Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi or Dorothy Day, a life of high purpose.”

  • “My youthful understanding of ‘Let your life speak’ led me to conjure up the highest values I could imagine and then try to conform my life to them whether they were mine or not.”
  • “Today, some thirty years later, ‘Let your life speak’ means something else to me, a meaning faithful both to the ambiguity of those words and to the complexity of my own experience: ‘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.’“
  • ”Verbalizing is not the only way our lives speak, of course. They speak through our actions and reactions, our intuitions and instincts, our feelings and bodily states of being, perhaps more profoundly than through our words.”
  • “If we can learn to read our own responses to our own experience—a text we are writing unconsciously every day we spend on earth—we will receive the guidance we need to live more authentic lives.“

The Truth about Vocation

“That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for ‘voice.’ Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live—but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.”

  • “Vocation, the way I was seeking it, becomes an act of will, a grim determination that one’s life will go this way or that whether it wants to or not. If the self is sin-ridden and will bow to truth and goodness only under duress, that approach to vocation makes sense. But if the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves—violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within. True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding our lives in check until we honor its truth.”
  • “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about—or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.”
  • “Behind this understanding of vocation is a truth that the ego does not want to hear because it threatens the ego’s turf: 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. This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches: 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.“
  • “Today I understand vocation quite differently—not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift 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.”
  • “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.'”

The Journey (or Pilgrimage)

”Most of us arrive at a sense of self and vocation only after a long journey through alien lands. But this journey bears no resemblance to the trouble-free ‘travel packages’ sold by the tourism industry. It is more akin to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage—‘a transformative journey to a sacred center‘ full of hardships, darkness, and peril.“

  • “In the tradition of pilgrimage, those hardships are seen not as accidental but as integral to the journey itself. Treacherous terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost—challenges of that sort, largely beyond our control, can strip the ego of the illusion that it is in charge and make space for true self to emerge. If that happens, the pilgrim has a better chance to find the sacred center he or she seeks. Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now—in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.“
  • “Years ago, someone told me that humility is central to the spiritual life. That made sense to me: I was proud to think of myself as humble! But this person did not tell me that the path to humility, for some of us at least, goes through humiliation, where we are brought low, rendered powerless, stripped of pretenses and defenses, and left feeling fraudulent, empty, and useless—a humiliation that allows us to regrow our lives from the ground up, from the humus of common ground.”
  • “I love the fact that the word humus—the decayed vegetable matter that feeds the roots of plants—comes from the same root that gives rise to the word humility. It is a blessed etymology. It helps me understand that the humiliating events of life, the events that leave ‘mud on my face’ or that ‘make my name mud,’ may create the fertile soil in which something new can grow.”

The God of Reality (vs Morality)

“The God I was told about in church, and still hear about from time to time, runs about like an anxious schoolmaster measuring people’s behavior with a moral yardstick. But the God I know is the source of reality rather than morality, the source of what is rather than what ought to be. This does not mean that God has nothing to do with morality: morality and its consequences are built into the God-given structure of reality itself. Moral norms are not something we have to stretch for, and moral consequences are not something we have to wait for: they are right here, right now, waiting for us to honor, or violate, the nature of self, other, world.”

  • “The God whom I know dwells quietly in the root system of the very nature of things. This is the God who, when asked by Moses for a name, responded, ‘I Am who I Am’ (Exodus 3:14), an answer that has less to do with the moral rules for which Moses made God famous than with elemental ‘isness’ and selfhood. If, as I believe, we are all made in God’s image, we could all give the same answer when asked who we are: ‘l Am who I Am.’ One dwells with God by being faithful to one’s nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not. Reality—including one’s own—is divine, to be not defied but honored.“

Paradoxes

“In a paradox, opposites do not negate each—they cohere in mysterious unity at the heart of reality. Deeper still, they need each other for health, as my body needs to breathe in as well as breathe out. 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 without darkness, the glories of spring and summer without the demands of autumn and winter—and the Faustian bargains we make fail to sustain our lives.”

  • “As often happens on the spiritual journey, we have arrived at the heart of a paradox: each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around—which puts the door behind us—and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls. The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.”
  • “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. When people ask me how it felt to emerge from depression, I can give only one answer: I felt at home in my own skin, and at home on the face of the earth, for the first time.”
  • “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.“
  • “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.’“

There is in all visible things … a hidden wholeness.

— Thomas Merton

Oughts & Shoulds

“Those clues are helpful in counteracting the conventional concept of vocation, which insists that our lives must be driven by ‘oughts.‘ As noble as that may sound, 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 … The deepest vocational question is not ‘What ought I to do with my life?’ It is the more elemental and demanding ‘Who am I? What is my nature?’“

  • “Sometimes the ‘shoulds’ do not work because the life one is living runs crosswise to the grain of one’s soul.“
  • “My altitude had been achieved by my ego, an inflated ego that led me to think more of myself than was warranted in order to mask my fear that I was less than I should have been. Finally, it had been achieved by my ethic, a distorted ethic that led me to live by images of who I ought to be or what I ought to do, rather than by insight into my own reality, into what was true and possible and life-giving for me.”
  • “For a long time, the ‘oughts’ had been the driving force in my life—and when I failed to live ‘up’ to those oughts, I saw myself as a weak and faithless person. I never stopped to ask, ‘How does such-and-such fit my God-given nature?’ or ‘Is such-and-such truly my gift and call?’ As a result, important parts of the life I was living were not mine to live and thus were doomed to fail.”

Limits & Potentials

“Everything in the universe has a nature, which means limits as well as potentials, a truth well known by people who work daily with the things of the world. Making pottery, for example, involves more than telling the clay what to become. The clay presses back on the potter’s hands, telling her what it can and cannot do—and if she fails to listen, the outcome will be both frail and ungainly.”

  • “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.“
  • “Lacking insight into my own limits and potentials, I had allowed ego and ethics to lead me into a situation that my soul could not abide.“
  • “The God I know does not ask us to conform to some abstract norm for the ideal self. God asks us only to honor our created nature, which means our limits as well as potentials.”
  • “The attempt to live by the reality of our own nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials, is a profoundly moral regimen.“
  • “Help each other see how limitations and liabilities are the flip side of our gifts, how a particular weakness is the inevitable trade-off for a particular strength. We will become better teachers not by trying to fill the potholes in our souls but by knowing them so well that we can avoid falling into them.”

Way Opening & Closing

“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.”

  • “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 honor 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.”
  • “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.“
  • “Like everything else in the spiritual life, getting guidance from way closing requires thoughtful discernment.”
  • “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.“
  • “When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless—a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other’s need to be cared for.”

Depression & Self-Knowledge

“Depression demands that we reject simplistic answers, both ‘religious’ and ‘scientific,’ and learn to embrace mystery, something 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. But our culture wants to turn mysteries into puzzles to be explained or problems to be solved, because maintaining the illusion that we can ‘straighten things out’ makes us feel powerful. Yet mysteries never yield to solutions or fixes—and when we pretend that they do, life becomes not only more banal but also more hopeless, because the fixes never work.”

  • “Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection—it deprives one of the relatedness that is the lifeline of every living being.”
  • “Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection, not just between people but between one’s mind and one’s feelings.“
  • “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.“
  • “Acknowledging my need for professional help was not easy. I had believed that going into therapy was a sign of weakness and that weakness was bad. But once I got past that barrier, I ran into another one: since professional has come to mean a person with a bagful of techniques and fixes, it is not always easy to find a professional who fulfills the original meaning of the word—a person grounded in a profession of faith, faith in the nature of ultimate reality, in the matrix of mercy in which our lives are embedded.“
  • “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.”
  • “The knowledge I am talking 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.“

Authentic Spirituality

“Why would anyone want to embark on the daunting inner journey about which Annie Dillard writes? Because there is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is in and through.“

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

— Annie Dillard

Five Monsters & Gifts on the Inner Journey

“We need to ride certain monsters all the way down, explore the shadows they create, and experience the transformation that can come as we ‘get into’ our own spiritual lives. Here is a bestiary of five such monsters. The five are not theoretical for me; I became personally acquainted with each of them during my descent into depression. They are also the monsters I work with when I lead retreats where leaders of many sorts—CEOs, clergy, parents, teachers, citizens, and seekers—take an inward journey toward common ground.”

1) “The first shadow-casting monster is insecurity about identity and worth.”

  • “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.”

2) “A second shadow inside many of us is the belief that the universe is a battleground, hostile to human interests.”

  • “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.”

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.”

  • “The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that ours is not the only act in town.“

4) “A fourth shadow within and among us is fear, especially our fear of the natural chaos of life.”

  • “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.”

5) “My final example of the shadows that leaders project is, paradoxically, the denial of death itself.”

  • “Within our denial of death lurks fear of another sort: the fear of failure.”
  • “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.”

“Getting into” our Inner Lives

“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. What might that help look like?”

  • “First, we could lift up the value of ‘inner work.‘ That phrase should become commonplace in families, schools, and religious institutions, at least, helping us understand that inner work is as real as outer work and involves skills one can develop, skills like journaling, reflective reading, spiritual friendship, meditation, and prayer. We can teach our children something that their parents did not always know: if people skimp on their inner work, their outer work will suffer as well.“
  • “Second, we could spread the word that inner work, though it is a deeply personal matter, is not necessarily a private matter: inner work can be helped along in community. Indeed, 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.”
  • “Third, we can remind each other of the dominant role that fear plays in our lives, of all the ways that fear forecloses the potentials … It is no accident that all of the world’s wisdom traditions address the fact of fear, for all of them originated in the human struggle to overcome this ancient enemy. And all of these traditions, despite their great diversity, unite in one exhortation to those who walk in their ways: ‘Be not afraid.'”

Recovering & Reclaiming our Birthright Gifts

“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. As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability … we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others.”

  • “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 twenties or thirties or forties, feeling profoundly lost, having wandered, or been dragged, far away from our birthright gifts.”
  • “We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. 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.“
  • It is a strange gift, this birthright gift of self. Accepting it turns out to be even more demanding than attempting to become someone else! I have sometimes responded to that demand by ignoring the gift, or hiding it, or fleeing from it, or squandering it—and I think I am not alone. There is a Hasidic tale that reveals, with amazing brevity, both the universal tendency to want to be someone else and the ultimate importance of becoming one’s self: 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?‘”
  • “She (my granddaughter) did not show up as raw material to be shaped into whatever image the world might want her to take. She arrived with her own gifted form, with the shape of her own sacred soul. 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.”

True Self

“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.”

  • “The figure calling to me all those years was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls ‘true self.’ This is not the ego self that wants to inflate us (or deflate us, another form of self-distortion), not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the ethical self that wants to live by some abstract moral code. It is the self planted in us by the God who made us in God’s own image—the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be.“
  • “My true self dragged me, kicking and screaming, toward honoring its nature and needs, forcing me to find my rightful place in the ecosystem of life.“
  • “Florida Scott Maxwell put it in terms more elegant than mine: ‘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.‘ I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.”

Where your Deep Gladness meets the World’s Deep Need

“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.’“

  • “Buechner’s definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world: it begins, wisely, where vocation begins—not in what the world needs (which is everything), but in the nature of the human self, in what brings the self joy, the deep joy of knowing that we are here on earth to be the gifts that God created.”
  • “Every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

Selfhood is not Selfish

”Contrary to the conventions of our thinly moralistic culture, this emphasis on gladness and selfhood is not selfish. The Quaker teacher Douglas Steere was fond of saying that the ancient human question ‘Who am l?’ leads inevitably to the equally important question ‘Whose am l?’—for there is no selfhood outside of relationship. We must ask the question of selfhood and answer it as honestly as we can, no matter where it takes us. Only as we do so can we discover the community of our lives.”

  • “By surviving passages of doubt and depression on the vocational journey, I have become clear about at least one thing: 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.”
  • “When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself—and me—even as I give it away. Only when I give something that does not grow within me do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal.”
  • “Some may say that this embrace is narcissistic, an obsession with self at the expense of others, but that is not how I experience it. When I ignored my own truth on behalf of a distorted ego and ethic, I led a false life that caused others pain —for which I can only ask forgiveness. When I started attending to my own truth, more of that truth became available in my work and my relationships. I now know that anything one can do on behalf of true self is done ultimately in the service of others.“
  • “From the depths of depression, I turn now to our shared vocation of leadership in the world of action. This may seem more like a leap than a turn, but none of the great wisdom traditions would look upon this segue with surprise. Go far enough on the inner journey, they all tell us—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.“

Acting on Authentic Selfhood

”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 selves 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 hood of millions of others.”

  • “Where do people find the courage to live divided no more when they know they will be punished for it? The answer I have seen in the lives of people like Rosa Parks is simple: these people have transformed the notion of punishment itself. They have come to understand that no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment.“
  • “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.“
  • “I lead by word and deed simply because I am here doing what I do. If you are also here, doing what you do, then you also exercise leadership of some sort.“
  • “The spiritual traditions do not deny the reality of the outer world. They simply claim that we help make that world by projecting our spirit on it, for better or for worse. If our institutions are rigid, it is because our hearts fear change; if they set us in mindless competition with each other, it is because we value victory over all else; if they are heedless of human wellbeing, it is because something in us is heartless as well.”
  • “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.”
  • “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.“
  • “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 complicity 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.”

Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around … For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better … and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable.

— Václav Havel

Egos, Ecosystems, & the Ecology of Life

“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.”

  • “Despite the American myth, I cannot be or do whatever I desire—a truism, to be sure, but a truism we often defy.”
  • “I wanted more than a job. I wanted deeper congruence between my inner and outer life.“
  • “By then it was obvious, even to me, that my desire to be president had much more to do with my ego than with the ecology of my life—so obvious that when the clearness committee ended, I called the school and withdrew my name from consideration.”
  • “The ecological theory of life, the theory of limits, works wonderfully well with situations like this: my nature makes me unfit to be president of anything, and therefore—if I stay true to what I know about myself—I will die having avoided a fate that for me would be worse than death.”
  • “As I learn more about the seed of true self that was planted when I was born, I also learn more about the ecosystem in which I was planted—the network of communal relations in which I am called to live responsively, accountably, and joyfully with beings of every sort. Only when I know both seed and system, self and community, can I embody the great commandment to love both my neighbor and myself.“

The Seasons of Selfhood & Vocation

“Throughout this book, I have looked at selfhood and vocation through metaphorical lenses, from the ‘seed’ of true self that is planted in the world at our birth to the ‘journey’ we take through darkness toward the light. I end with yet another metaphor, looking at selfhood and vocation through the turning of the seasons.”

  • “The seasonal metaphor deepens our understanding of the others. Seeds move through their life stages in an endless cycle of seasons—and the cycle of seasons reminds us that the journey never ends. 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 l?’ but, in the words of Rilke, ‘living the questions’ throughout our lives.”
  • “Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. 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.”
  • “From autumn’s profligate seedings to the great spring giveaway, nature teaches a steady lesson: if we want to save our lives, we cannot cling to them but must spend them with abandon. When we are obsessed with bottom lines and productivity, with efficiency of time and motion, with the rational relation of means and ends, with projecting reasonable goals and making a beeline toward them, it seems unlikely that our work will ever bear full fruit, unlikely that we will ever know the fullness of spring in our lives.”
  • “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.”
Sloww Let Your Life Speak Seasons

Transformation

“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. Unlike ‘raw material’ on which we make all the demands, this ecology makes demands on us even as it sustains our lives. We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.”

  • “Transformation is difficult, so it is good to know that there is comfort as well as challenge in the metaphor of life as a cycle of seasons. Illumined by that image, we see that we are not alone in the universe. 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. We can, and we must—if we want our sciences to be humane, our institutions to be sustaining, our healings to be deep, our lives to be true.”

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