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

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation | Parker J. Palmer | Palmer is the Real Deal

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Let Your Life Spea...

	Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation Parker J. Palmer Jossey-Bass, 1999 - 128 pages average customer review:based on 54 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Validating....

This book is an inspiration for those feeling "the pull"--the struggle between "what society tells me I should be doing" and "what I feel I need/was born to do". Both my husband and I could not put it down. Palmer validated our feelings of "I don't think the rat race is what life is really about..." whereby giving us the confidence to pursue major life and career changes. Read a paragraph, stop and think...and then read on....

Palmer is the Real Deal

I generally make notations and highlight important thoughts when reading a book. Parker Palmer's "Let Your Life Speak" has more notations and highlights in its 109 pages than do most books 2-3 times its length. While the subject - how am I living my life? - is not new, Parker makes the book come alive by presenting old concepts in a new, unfamiliar way.

The book is derived from essays Parker has published during the past decade. He does not present them as published, but rather he has rewritten them and developed the parts into a coherent whole.

Chapter 1 challenges the reader to listen to life.
Chapter 2 probes on how we become ourselves.
Chapter 3 focuses on things of the past (the way closes) and things of the future (the way opens).
Chapter 4 puts our personal infernos (all the way down) and the path to God into perspective.
Chapter 5 brings the reader to the all-important "Leading from Within."
Chapter 6 uses the metaphor of seasons to relate to the realities of life.

Some of the thoughts I have highlighted include:

The self wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be - the "True self," (our)true friend...(and) one ignores such friendship at one's peril.

Burnout is a state of emptiness - trying to give what I do not possess.

We are led to truth by our weaknesses as well as our strengths.

The distortion of the true self comes from living from the outside in, rather than from the inside out.

There are many, many more gems like these to meditate on, to move us, and to help us on the journey to our "True" selves. If you are willing to take the journey within and to discover your "True" self, then this is THE book written especially for you.

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"Ask me whether what I have done is my life." (1)

I got this book some time ago, when one of the professors at BC recommended it to me as a way to think about what I wanted to do with my life and of course, I never read it. However, I'm almost glad that I didn't read it until now, because at this point in my life I think I needed it more than I did when I was choosing a path. Palmer is basically telling his own story of vocation, including all the dark spots that he hit along the way. However, he emphasizes the need to see the good and the possibilities for growth in those dark spots. For example, in the final chapter he compares life to the changing seasons in an extended metaphor. For winter, he says, "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" (101). His main point is that in order to do this (renew ourselves for growth in our vocation), each person should learn to listen to their inner self because that is the only way that we will truly become the full person that God created us to be. He does frequently refer to religious ideas like this but, the nice thing about his writing is even though he is religious, this idea does not overwhelm the book and it can really be for anyone (though I'm sure that an atheist might not get as much out of this as a religious person would).

This book helped me to look at my life and see if I could discover what my "inner self" has been trying to tell me, even in times of my darkness and "winter", about my vocation.

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