the art of vocation...

so i am reading a cool little book that i am borrowing from mark... its called 'let your life speak' and its written by a certain parker j. palmer... good little read, a small book full of large asertations... and very compelling...

here are a few things that caught me off guard in a sort of zen way...

he speaks of how before we tell our lives where we are going to go or what we are going to be or how we are going to be identified, that we must look into our 'true selves' and find out what they have to say...

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...if the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his failings will go well beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril.

later he speaks of how that means being brutally honest with ourselves, and venturing through the dark places and remembering them, not covering them up for some great success story... read on...

Many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives. When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had deceloped a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race... [and] as pilgrims must discover if they are to complete their quest, we are led to truth by our weaknesses as well as our strengths.

i really should shower now, pick up my sisters car, and work on prepping tomorrow's discussion... and then go to a concert...