Vocation.

Persistent rain this campervan morning. It started light enough, but has gotten progressively heavy and has driven me inside to the van. A few early snatches of birdsong have been removed by rain falling on the roof, walls and streaming down windows. And it’s grey once more, though there was some welcome sunshine yesterday. It’s been replaced by puddles and streams of water washing down the road, seeming to ease momentarily and then increase and then ease again. So it’s an inside musing this morning, accompanied by beating rain. It feels a bit of a cheat, the artificial tin box on wheels rather than the Oak, but better than getting soaked. So here we are snatching a few moments before drumming. I was deep yesterday in reviewing my notes around another of my favourite authors Parker J Palmer in preparation for the book section of the Campervan Mornings website. In particular his book ‘Courage to Teach ‘. He writes :

“ We are drawn to a body of knowledge because it shed light on our identity as well as on the world “.

I kinda cast me eye over my bookshelf, the contents of my notebooks and they chart a journey through my interests, my thirst for knowing from drumming to silence, from history to nature, from counselling to the self, from technology to minimalism, I am sure you get the idea. I wonder what light it shed on my self. How it drives, creates and shifts who I am and what I about and what my vocation might be. Carrying on from yesterdays closing quote, there is a refusal in me to stand still. I love this quote from Carl Frederick Buechner, who writes of vocation as :

“ The place where your deep gladness and the worlds deep hunger meet “.

I think I am on the journey to that place or at least somewhere in that area or close to it.

Thank you to all those that checked in on my new website and subscribed to the YouTube channel. I would be grateful if you spread the word. Have lovely days people.

“ A vocation that is not mine, no matter how externally valued, does violence to the self, in the precise sense that it violates my identity and integrity on behalf of some abstract norm “.

Parker J Palmer.