heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
The teacher Parker Palmer echoes the theme: “As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.”
The core of that, for Palmer, was listening. “Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail—and even do great damage.” You don’t find your vocation through an act of taking charge. “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about.”
I have a friend named Pete Wehner who is an amazing listener. I’ll describe some problem to him, and he’ll ask me some questions. There comes a moment in the conversation, after he’s asked four or five questions, when I expect him to start offering his opinions and recommendations. But then he surprises me and asks six or eight more questions, before eventually offering counsel or advice. Real listening, whether to others or yourself, involves that unexpected extra round of questions, stretching the asking beyond what feels natural.
Listening to your life means having patience. Many of us confront most of life with a prematurely evaluating attitude. We have a natural tendency to make up our mind instantly, the moment we encounter something. The problem is that once we’ve filed something away with a judgment—even our very selves—we stop seeing it in all its complexity. The wilderness teaches negative capability, the ability to rest in uncertainty, to not jump to premature conclusions.
Listening to life means asking, What have I done well? What have I done poorly? What do I do when I’m not being paid or rewarded? Were there times when I put on faces that other people wanted me to wear, or that I thought other people wanted me to wear?
When you’re in the wilderness, a better version of yourself has a tendency to emerge. “When I venture into wilderness, I’m surprised by how much I enjoy my own company,” Belden Lane writes. “The person I travel with there isn’t worried about his performance. He sheds the polished persona he tries so often to project to others. Scribbling in my journal under the shade of a pin oak atop Bell Mountain, I’m happy as a lark. I want to be the person that I am when I’m alone in wilderness.” This is the beginning of an important revelation.
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us,” Annie Dillard writes in Teaching a Stone to Talk. “But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other.”
This is the pivotal point, maybe of this whole book. On the surface of our lives most of us build the hard shell. It is built to cover fear and insecurity and win approval and success. When you get down to the core of yourself, you find a different, more primeval country, and in it a deep yearning to care and connect. You could call this deep core of yourself the pleroma, or substrate. It is where your heart and soul reside.
After her first daughter was born, a friend of mine, Catherine Bly Cox, told me, “I found I loved her more than evolution required.” I’ve always loved that observation because it points to that deeper layer. There are the things that drive us toward material pleasure, and there are evolutionary forces that drive us to reproduce and pass down our genes. These are the layers of life covered by economics and political science and evolutionary psychology. But those layers don’t explain Chartres Cathedral or “Ode to Joy”; they don’t explain Nelson Mandela in jail, Abraham Lincoln in the war room, or a mother holding her baby. They don’t explain the fierceness and fullness of love, as we all experience it.
This is the layer we’re trying to reach in the wilderness. These are the springs that will propel us