Let Your Life Speak

"True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost."

"Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am."

"Ask Me," William Stafford

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

Excerpted from "Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation" by Parker J. Palmer. Copyright (c) 2000 by Jossey Bass, Inc., Publishers, a company of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.