I’ve been reading Parker Palmer: Let Your Life Speak. In some ways it’s a continuation of what I did with Stephen Cope’s book. Parker Palmer talks about vocation. How do you know what your vocation is? Not from ego, not to be important or famous or make a lot of money. Something your have to listen for, a calling from the soul.
My book, The Feminine of History is Mystery, developed out of a dream class, taught by Charles Poncé. He was a Jungian and looked at our dreams in terms of archetypes. I began to see a polarity: Sun-Moon, Male-Female, Righthand-Lefthand, the two hemispheres of the brain — so I decided to write a book with left-hand pages and right-hand pages.
I also developed a fade-dissolve slide show which involved two projectors and a device that allowed me to fade from one to the other. The pictures were mostly ones I had taken on several trips to England and France to see megalithic monuments. Later I found someone who had the expertise to turn it into a video on a DVD which made the presentation much easier. I had imagined I would get opportunities to do the show for audiences and could sell books at the same time. But, alas, this clever idea was derailed by depression rooted in trauma.
Journey Into Courage. Remembering how Beverly & I said we would do street theater around childhood sexual abuse. And then I saw we weren’t doing it, so I said to God “If you want this to happen, somebody else has to do it.” Only a few weeks later Lynelle told me there was a drama class for victims of domestic violence at Umbrella in St. J. So I went, and that became Journey Into Courage. Telling the truth about my life on stage. Changing, expanding, people’s understanding of domestic violence.
It changed people’s lives. Perhaps my vocation is to change people’s lives.
I discovered folk dance on New Year’s Eve 1964-65. I was in Paris with some Greek friends, and we went to a party where they were doing Greek folk dance. When I moved to Brunswick Maine, I started going to a regular folk dance class. When I moved to Franconia, I brought a tape of my favorites and taught a small group. Then I heard about Sacred Circle Dance, based in the old folk dances but with the understanding that they had a sacred dimension. The man I was married to at the time was teaching Aikido, a martial art that has a spiritual dimension. Eventually we decided to build a building for sacred movement arts, and that was Neskaya Movement Arts Center.
But now what? Having moved away from Franconia I no longer teach dance at Neskaya. Does Jenny still have a vocation? If I don’t have a vocation, what’s the point? Having a vocation gives meaning to my life. I’ve been looking at some things I have done with my life, wondering if there is a common thread that could be my vocation.
What if your life has meaning just as it is?
I got this far on April 6, and haven’t written anything since. In work with Erica, what happened was I remembered all the people who told me “When you said …. it changed my life.” What I said was something ordinary for me, not an attempt to educate. I think of one story. I was at Kripalu, returning from a walk with a friend. I saw a wasp walking across the sidewalk. It was too cold for him to fly. I was afraid he would get stepped on, so I picked him up by one leg and put him on the base of a statue that stood by the door. My friend was astonished to see me do this, and said something like “WOW! How can you do that!” I said “I’m a member in good standing of the insect rescue league.” “Well, you just changed my life.”
I think of Angela saying, after I talked about Neskaya to a therapy group she was holding in the building itself “You are way outside the boxes those women live in.” She’s the one who thought that the building was a “healing sanctuary.” I remember thinking, maybe even setting an intention, that Neskaya should affect everyone who came in by lifting their consciousness one level above where it was when they came in.
I think it may very well be true that my vocation is just to be myself, and just being myself I change people’s lives.