Is Your Life Speaking? Recently I’ve been rereading Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening to the Voice of Vocation.

Published in 2000, I’ve probably read this small, thoughtful book more than 20 times. While it has its original dust jacket, it is dog-eared, the spine it broken and it is a bit raggedy. It is also well highlighted. In addition to highlights from different readings, there are underlines in ink and notations in the margins. This book has spoken to me. 

Feeling the need for words of comfort as well as reflection, I pulled this book off the shelf. (I often “hear” the suggestion for a book I’ve read in the past…so I know to respond to these promptings!) 

Recent weeks have been unsettling. Some days it is difficult to find my footing. Not surprisingly I had a week of experiencing vertigo – a time of feeling particularly ungrounded and apart from my body. I wonder if you are struggling to feel the ground beneath your feet too. 

Palmer writes about going to ground. In fact, he suggests that we need to go all the way to ground to locate ourselves in the world. For him, this happened through the experience of depression. For me it has happened in times of great loss, change and transition. Times when I need to locate myself, my weaknesses and strengths, my spirit, inside myself. 

Palmer reminded me that it is important to attend to my own truth. By doing so, more of our own truths become available to us for work, relationships and life. 

Palmer writes: “To embrace weakness, liability, and darkness as part of who I am gives that part less sway over me, because all it ever wanted was to be acknowledged as part of my whole self.” 

Living into our whole selves is daunting work. In difficult times it means coming alongside our own doubt, fear, suffering, pain, loss, change, and uncertainty. I think I needed to reread this book to remember that. To remember that wholehearted living is about living toward our truest selves as much and whenever possible. 

In this time, it can be hard to know where to invest our own energies. Problems, difficulties, and challenges are at the door every day. If one only follows the news cycles, that is all that you’ll be able to take in. 

Instead, I’ve worked hard to stop following the news cycle. To release myself from the clutches of social media platforms and to instead seek to align with my inner self. I believe she holds the keys to what it is I can do in the present. 

She beckons me to take good care of the spirit God put in me and to seek God’s guidance for any next steps at hand. She invites me to listen to what my life is speaking right now. 

I wonder what your life is speaking to you. If you cannot hear that still small voice within, I invite you to slow down. To release the energy of trying to figure it all out in favor of the energy of curiosity. 

We are all navigating something entirely new as the landscapes of communities and our country changes around us every day. Take your time, trust the process, and seek out the voices that have resonated with you in times of change in the past. Parker Palmer, Anne Lamott, Brene Brown, Diana Butler Bass, Barbara Brown Taylor…who are the people whose writing has spoken to your heart? Pull those books off the shelf and rest in their words for a while.