Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

By Parker J. Palmer

The 25th Anniversary Edition of a modern classic, with a new Introduction by its celebrated author

“Is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?” With this searching question, bestselling author Parker J. Palmer begins his insightful and moving meditation on finding our way toward meaning and purpose. As readers of many ages, backgrounds and walks of life will attest, Let Your Life Speak is an elegant and openhearted gift to all who seek to live authentically.

We find a path that's right for us by embracing what gives us life and rejecting what diminishes us, listening more closely to the voice of “true self” than to what others expect or demand of us. As we live more deeply into our own identity and integrity, we find both personal fulfillment and our place in the community to which we belong. As always, Palmer writes honestly and vulnerably about his own life, including the fumbles and failures that have marked his unconventional vocational journey. He chronicles his deep dives into depression, and his quest for “an undivided life” that would allow him to offer his best gifts to the world. The details of his story are unique, but the insights he draws from it are universal.

Let Your Life Speak offers no simplistic formulas for finding a meaningful path through life's complexities. Instead, it offers real-life experience, thoughtfully mined for insight and wisdom:

• Learn how to listen to your inner teacher and follow its guidance toward a sense of meaning and purpose
• Reframe your life as a series of “experiments with truth,” learning from those that fail as well as those that work
• Understand that the doors that close behind you can offer as much guidance as those that open up
• Gain inspiration and resolve from the lives of seekers who have walked this path before you

Enjoy the wisdom, compassion, gentle humor and companionship of a master teacher in a beloved book that has helped hundreds of thousands of people find their way toward meaning and purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781394235117

Parker J. Palmer

Parker J. Palmer, a popular speaker and educator, is also the author of The Active Life. He received the 1993 award for "Outstanding Service to Higher Education" from the Council of Independent Colleges.

Book preview

Parker J. Palmer

Author of The Courage to Teach

LET YOUR LIFE SPEAK

LISTENING FOR THE VOICE OF VOCATION

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First edition © 2000 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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ISBNs: 9781394235100 (cloth), 9781394235124 (ePDF), 9781394235117 (ePub)

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COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHY

COVER ART: SHARON L. PALMER

For Heather Marie Palmer my granddaughter

May you always treasure true self …

GRATITUDES

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 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.

I mention the provenance of these pieces partly because I believe in truth in labeling and partly because the people who invited me to write the original essays, with all the trust that implies, are valued partners in my own vocation.

Chapter II, Now I Become Myself, was originally given as the G. D. Davidson Lecture at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina, and published by the college as a pamphlet.¹ The unusual charge that accompanies the lectureship helped frame this book: reflect on your life story through the concept of vocation—including lessons learned from disappointments and failures as well as successes—and do so in a way that might speak to younger as well as older adults. I am grateful to my friend Doug Orr, president of the college, for extending the invitation; to Don and Ann Davidson for endowing a lectureship that invites this sort of reflection; and to the entire Warren Wilson community for receiving my words with such deep hospitality.

Chapter III, When Way Closes, was originally written for Weavings, a quarterly journal of spirituality, at the request of its editor, John Mogabgab.² John, my good friend for many years, is one of the best companions a person could have along the way, and Weavings—the journal he has raised up from its infancy—is widely regarded as one of the finest periodicals of its kind.

Chapter IV, All the Way Down, was originally written for a special issue of Weavings on the theme of the wounded healer in memory of Henri Nouwen.³ Henri was a treasured friend and mentor to both John Mogabgab and me, and this chapter is testimony to the transcendent power of friendship. It explores my experience with depression, a subject I could not have dealt with so openly except for the support of friends still living and the spirit of a friend now gone.

Chapter V, Leading from Within, was originally given as a speech for the Indiana Office of Campus Ministries, which published it as a pamphlet.⁴ I am grateful to my friend Max Case, executive director, for his invitation and encouragement. Indeed, I am grateful to the many campus ministers, priests, and rabbis across the country who helped me take first steps toward my calling thirty years ago, at a time when few in the academy were willing to entertain spiritual questions, at least not in public—a situation that is, blessedly, different today.

Chapter VI, There Is a Season, was written at the request of Rob Lehman, president of the Fetzer Institute and my good friend and co‐conspirator in vocation, to help dedicate Fetzer's retreat center, Seasons. The Institute published this essay as a pamphlet that is placed in the bedrooms at Seasons to invite guests into reflection.⁵ I think of that pamphlet as Fetzer's equivalent of the Hilton's pillow mints—and I think of Rob Lehman as a pioneer in empowering so many of us to explore the complex connections between inner and outer life.

Special thanks go to Sarah Polster, my editor at Jossey‐Bass. She was the first to see that the question of vocation was at the heart of many of the essays I have written in recent years and to believe in their potential to become a real book. Her skillful editing has helped bring these essays together in a fabric more tightly woven than I could have achieved on my own.

My thanks also go to the other members of the Jossey‐Bass staff who have been such superb partners in publishing: Carol Brown, Joanne Clapp Fullagar, Paula Goldstein, Danielle Neary, Johanna Vondeling, and Jennifer Whitney.

Much of the personal journey I trace in this book was made in the company of, and with the support of, members of my family, past and present. I did not include them in my narrative simply because their stories belong to them alone; the only tale I know how to tell, or have a right to tell, is my own. But I thought of my family often and with deep gratitude as I was writing about the parts of the journey we shared.

To Sally Palmer, Brent Palmer, Todd Palmer, and Carrie Palmer: thank you for all the love you have given me along the way.

To Heather Palmer: thank you for the new love and laughter you have brought into my life—though I'd be grateful if you would stop reminding me to eat my vegetables!

To Sharon Palmer: thank you for your gifted editing that is vital to my vocation as a writer and for the love that sustains me as I learn how to let my life speak.

Parker J. Palmer

Madison, Wisconsin

July 1999

NOTES

1. Parker J. Palmer, Seeking Vocation in Darkness and Light (Swannanoa, N.C.: Warren Wilson College, 1999).

2. Parker J. Palmer, On Minding Your Call—When No One Is Calling, Weavings, May‐June 1996, pp. 15–22.

3. Parker J. Palmer, All the Way Down: Depression and the Spiritual Journey, Weavings, Sept.‐Oct. 1998, pp. 31–41.

4. Parker J. Palmer, Leading from Within: Reflections on Spirituality and Leadership (Indianapolis: Indiana Office of Campus Ministry, 1990).

5. Parker J. Palmer, Seasons (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Fetzer Institute, n.d.).

INTRODUCTION TO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Parker J. Palmer

In late 1999, Let Your Life Speak was released into the wild. Somehow, this little book about the slow process of finding a path of meaning and purpose quickly found a path of its own. Within a few months, readers began letting me know that the book had helped them find guidance, not from me, but from themselves as they learned to listen more closely to their own lives.

The warm reception given Let Your Life Speak came as a great relief to me. The book draws heavily on stories of my own attempts to find a path, many of them involving fumbles, stumbles, and hard falls. Why? Because I've learned more from my missteps and defeats than from my successes. When I succeed, I do little more than congratulate myself. When I fail, I slow down and think, trying to learn what I can about myself and the world in hope of not making that kind of mistake again.

But going public about these hard‐won lessons felt risky. Why would anyone want to read a book by a guy who's been something of a klutz at finding his way, whose life has often seemed like a zig‐zagging series of experiments, some of which were spectacular failures? Would this

Reviews for Let Your Life Speak

[paul9the9well9read · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The full title of the book includes the phrase, "Listening to the Voice of Vocation," which could mislead one (such as me) into thinking the book was about careers. But the book is really not about carreers, but about hearing and responding to your personal calling.. In spite of its short length, it is full of ideas and observations about connecting to our inner selves, the inner core of our being that helps give meaning and fulfillment in our lives.
An example of the kind of thinking found in this book comes from this question it poses, "Do you waste time on anger, or invest it in hope?"
The book is about growth and change, realizing that change is neither easy not fast, but instead recommends, "Changing as slowly as ripening fruit." The kind of personal change that is like ripening fruit is usually called "growth," and this book presents some excellent ideas about the change that develops only through growth.
In short, it is a wonderful and insightful read and I am very glad to have experienced it.

[trinker-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a little gem of a book. I think it would make a wonderful gift for graduates or people in life transitions.

[narshkite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Astonishing. This is my field, I read a lot about vocation for work, and this is quiet simply the best book on the topic I have ever read. If the bad poetry were excised it would be perfect, but its as close as can be as is. For anyone who wants to think about their place the world, the essence of community and leadership this is a must read.

[michael_godfrey-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In some ways this reader feels like the mortician at a birthday gig: the reviews of Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak are almost to a person adulatory - and so, to a point, they should be. In a US world of achieverism - to coin a word - Palmer's self-confessedly Mertonesque call to the journey and the voice within (the influence of a spirituality of Inner Light) would surely be oasis in a desert landscape. But Palmer writes for the extrovert (79). Strangely, in the ecclesiastical circles in which I move, extroversion is a minority perspective. Despite experiencing a vocation to leadership, the leaders of faith communities with whom I introspectively and all but apologetically run shoulders are predominately introverts. This may be a fundamental difference between the US and my spheres of OZ/NZ, or it may be a difference between Palmer's sphere of origin and my introspective Anglicanism/Episodecopalianism: who knows? But his world is very different to mine.Palmer's call to the interior life therefore leave me cold. Get me out of there! Teach me instead to strive for the stars, teach me to dance, teach me to yell from the rooftop of my quivering faith! This book was not written for this wallflower faith with which I struggle day by day. But it was written and written well for someone I am not. It may not, if I may grasp at one of the world's worst cliches, scratch where I itch, but I not despite by ego the Universal Man. It clearly touches those in a skin vastly different tonne - and yes I hear the egotism of my decrials! And, when at last I turn to the final chapter, I hear at last a voice that speaks to meSo no: not my book. But yes, a good book. But one that somehow passes this reader by - trapped in all the arrogance of that observation.

[kaulsu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It was quite a treat to re-read this Quaker classic for the 2012 QPCC coming in a few weeks. I first read this book right before I entered seminary and it's ideas of calling angpd gifts were new to me. Although I was familiar with Merton and Rilke and Dillard, Frederick Buechner was new. I found his often quoted definition of vocation, "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's greatest need" to resonate within me even to today. If you have not yet read this slim volume, I think you will find something of value within its pages.

[jpsnow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Certain books prove that it takes depth of experience and a lot of contemplation in order to be both profound and concise. Parker Palmer is one such case. If his experiences haven't been as harrowing as Frankl's or as isolated as Merton's, they are in some ways more directly relevant to the modern experience of career's as a quest for fulfillment. Palmer has been an academic, a social worker, a teacher, and a writer, not to mention what can only be described as a Quaker-monastic. The summary sentence is: "Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be." The full work is elegant, and every chapter will give you a thought that merits reflection. I recommend it.

[flyingbarney · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very different way of looking into one's vocation. An awesome timeless read.

[daletadlock · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

With wisdom, compassion and gentl humor, Parker J. Palmer invites us to listen to the inner teacher and follow its leadings toward a sense of meaning and purpose. Telling stories from his own life and the lives of others who have made a difference, he shares insights gained from darkness and depression as well as fulfillment and joy, illuminating a pathway toward vocation for all who seek the true calling of their lives.

[ctoll_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Palmer writes about his own decisions regarding career and vocation and in the process helps readers to think about what matters in their lives. There is also a chapter in which Parker writes about his own pyschological depressions and the insights he gained from them regarding the need to honor one's shadow self. This book influenced my thinking about my own career choices; I have given copies to several friends who were seeking to find their way in life.