What Is A Calling, Anyway?
There are many ways to define big ideas like one’s “calling” or “life purpose.” Behind these mammoth ideas are the most existential human questions: Who Am I? Why Am I Here? What’s Mine Alone to Do in this Lifetime?
From the bird’s eye view, these questions are all questions of belonging. We grow up belonging to a family, for better or worse (and most often both). If we’re lucky, we gain at least some implicit or explicit sense of who we are in the world— but at best, it’s only a glimmer.
From this tremulous beginning, we’re thrust out into the world, into a lifelong adventure in belonging. All beings— animal, cloud, stone, fish or plant— must find and establish belonging in the world. And no one, not a single organism, is left without particular gifts and their own, instinctual-knowing nature.
To properly answer those existential questions, or more fittingly to live the questions, as poet Rainer Maria Rilke suggests we do, we have to strive first to belong to ourselves… to find belonging from the inside out. In order to do this, we have to follow our callings and find our purpose.
But what does that even mean? What is a calling, and is it the same as our purpose?
Here’s how I think of it:
Your path is a mosaic of callings you feel compelled to follow.
In following them, a thread is found,
and that is your purpose.
Callings take so many forms.
You might be called to paint a vivid dream,
do a service project,
learn to cook the traditional foods of your people,
write a book,
move to a certain place,
try a new road home
pull over to converse with a particular tree
train in a skill
join a mystery school
forgive everyone
phone an old friend
devote yourself to bees...
The callings become the path to your purpose,
which is an ever-deepening gift you have for the world.
This is a gift no one else has.
It's not a particular career or static identity.
It's not a project or thing you make.
It could be a vocation but it's not a job.
It's more like a message,
a teaching,
a way of being in the world,
a particular role you're here to play,
a mythic task…
Your purpose evolves throughout your life
as you follow its many callings
as you listen ever more deeply
to your own, hard-won truth.
Your purpose is utterly unique
though you will find others who share
a closely related, sacred task.
These are your people.
Your soul tribe.
Each of you a voice
in a particular song,
a lineage of wisdom.
But your path is walked
by you alone
No one else can walk it,
or trample it
or copy it
or deny you it,
for that matter.
Your path will surprise you
with the way it always changes
but your purpose will remain
essentially the same
from birth to death
perhaps beyond
It will always be the same poem
the same thread
the same task
offered thousands of ways
across thousands of moments
in every crevice of your life
for as long as you live.
May you follow the path
And be found by the Song.
Again and again and again.
—
with gratitude to all my many teachers on path & purpose + to the living Earth, who continually shows me the path and mirrors to me my purpose.
Guidance in Hearing
& Heeding your calling
I truly believe that you have everything you need within you already, but following our callings to our greater purpose is not easily done in an industrial-patriarchal culture. A Soul Guide is one who works in service to the greater agenda of the human soul. In my Wild Becoming Immersion, I work intimately with women+ who are ready to track, name and claim the threads of who they are and why they’re here in no uncertain terms.