Parker Palmer’s graceful little book Let Your Life Speak is the best work I’ve ever read on discernment and vocation.
In six chapters and just under 120 elegantly written pages, Palmer presses home the point that vocation emerges from within us and that we must listen carefully to our own lives if we are to discover it. Taking on someone else’s concept of calling or subjecting ourselves to an external and alien set of values and objectives will do violence to ourselves and to our usefulness—Palmer would probably avoid the word—to our community and our world. Throughout, the author’s rooting in Quaker patterns and rhythms is evident, but this book is anything but sectarian and will be welcomed—indeed, has been welcomed, for it was published in the year 2000—by readers of many faiths and perhaps of none. (more…)
Really, you wonder why one of us didn’t invent this twenty years ago. It requires no rocket science, just somebody who was able to ‘see beyond the little tree’.
It took our birds (house finches, various species of woodpeckers, chickadees, nuthatches, cardinals) a while to figure out how to maneuver their way into the right stance for getting at the suet, probably because the roof and its overhang briefly confused them. But then it was open season. The advantage of stocking the feeder with two suet cakes seems to be in reducing the need to re-stock to roughly half as frequent a job as it was before. That is, having two rather than one suet cake doesn’t seem to attract more birds; it just means that roughly the same number of birds have more supply to work on, so it lasts longer.
It worked.
Having recently seen the effects of 15-year-old Lasik surgery wane and moved (back) to eyeglasses, I’ve rediscovered how annoying it is to have smudges on my sense. Truth be told, I used to use a shirt-tail to wipe my glasses back in my Philistine stage. Part of being a certified Grown-up may well be carrying something decent with which to clean one’s glasses.
Canter Bridge 