Discerning The Call That Knocks on Your Door
Questions that I am often asked about the invitation to make a pilgrimage journey are: “How do I know if this is really The Call knocking on my door?” “How do I know if this just isn’t a mood or a distraction from my responsibilities?” There are, fortunately, ways to tell. The great mythologist Joseph Campell who did extensive work around the idea of the monomyth, or the hero’s journey, notes four experiential qualities that accompany The Call. Do these resonate with you?
At some point in your life, you begin to wonder if this is really all it has to offer, or perhaps there is a sense that you have gotten off track and are on a completely different road than you ever thought you would travel. Perhaps life has become tinged with a sense of smallness, a meaningless mundanity; access to the parts of you that still beat with wild wings and startle with wonder at the sound of mystery or at the stars in the sky seem locked away without a key. Or perhaps you have sought after the spiritual life, desiring an ascent that will take you high above and away from the pain and suffering of this world. But no matter how set apart you become, you still feel the snares of sorrow. And perhaps you may already be wise to the game of the conventional life, knowing that intentionality and centeredness is counter to the crazy consumption of our culture.
And yet, there seems to be something calling to you from a deeper place, calling to you like the trees’ blood of which Rilke writes, to “sink back into the source of everything,” to “to out into your heart as onto a vast plain.”
You’ve recognized that there is a journey you must take that will take you down into the sacred, subterranean lands of your soulscape, a journey that will give you that key to recover the wild and precious parts of you.
The Call knocks on the status quo of your life, and stays knocking until you answer and open the door, surrendering to the invitation to cross the threshold, leave the home you know, and go on your own way towards that desire that showed up, cloaked as curiosity and questions. This knock at your door is an invitation to find the lost and scattered pieces of yourself.
Print by John Bauer
Questions that I am often asked are, “How do I know if this is really The Call knocking on my door?” “How do I know if this just isn’t a mood or a distraction from my responsibilities?” There are, fortunately, ways to tell. The great mythologist Joseph Campell who did extensive work around the idea of the monomyth, or the hero’s journey, notes four experiential qualities that accompany The Call.
First, if it is a true call, you will know that responding to it is, in fact, not an avoidance of responsibility, but rather a facing of something difficult; something unknown and frightening is summoning you. Ecopsychologist, author and wilderness guide, Bill Plotkin, describes this as “a compelling need to walk into the mouth of a whale, or out into the night and into a storm.” This isn’t an easy vacation away from your life. This isn't a trip to forget your cares. This is a profound sense that your one true life will only be found, be recovered, in the wilderness, and your survival now depends on the departure.
Second, Campbell reminds us of the paradox that there is something strangely recognizable about this unknown journey. You have a deep sense of belonging to the journey and the wild edges to where it is taking you; you feel an uprising of ancient memories, the woven fabric of kin and familiarity, that covers you like a favorite cloak. This strange and sacred summons was made for you.
Third, you have an astonishing and incomprehensible sense that the season of life you have been living is suddenly over, whether you want it to or not. In the great myths and legends, this often is when the protagonist is chosen of the journey, instead of she choosing it. Recently I have been doing some personal work with the Slavic folk lore stories of the Baba Yaga. In one such tale, a born-of-a-bear giant named Ivan engages in a transformational journey with the Yaga. In this story there is the adventure that he chooses; however, his heroic transformation doesn’t occur until the part where the descent, The Call, chooses him.
Fourth, The Call is almost always unexpected, and often unwanted. This is a disruption to life as you have known it, and who needs that when life is already busy, overwhelming and chaotic? However, this is a summons from the soul; a demanding can’t-shake-you command from your future self that you need this for your soul-survival and future flourishing.
Plotkin offers a fifth way to discern if The Call is a genuine. He asks that you imagine not acting on it and then noticing how you feel. “Imagine you are going to ignore The Call, or even laugh it off. How does that feel? Do you detect a building dread, a huge sadness, a guilt that comes from refusing a sacred invitation?” What if you don’t answer the door, or better yet, answer it and after saying, “No thank you,” close it, refusing the needs of your future self? Another way to determine the validity of the call would be to say, “yes” and begin to take those first furtive steps onto the path that begins to suddenly manifest before each tentatively placed step. With each step that is taken, a sense of assurance is gained, a feeling of rightness grows.
If it is a true call, you may feel like your going out is actually a return towards your true home for the very first time.
By Kay NiELSON "East of the sun and west of the moon" 1914
Know this though: while The Call’s knocking may never stop, you will become deaf to its solicitation over time. It is essential that you act on The Call as soon as you are ready as the window of opportunity may not remain open for long. It is a sacred aligning of serendipitous circumstance when you are at a place to both hear the knock, and open the door to it. You, however, must make the choice to walk out the door.
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.
~Adrienne Rich
Rainier Maria Rilke, from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 95-96.
Joseph Campell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), 55, 58.
David Whyte, from “Sweet Darkness,” in The House of Belonging (Langely, WA: Many Rivers Press, 1997), 23.
Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2003), 57-58.
Listening in Place as Practice & Poetry-A Workshop with David Whyte
“The Practice & Poetry of Listening in Place” was the title of the workshop I was invited to facilitate with the poet, writer, and philosopher David Whyte. From this starting place, we drew upon themes of the selva oscura, the dark woods, and how the path is both guide and our truest selves. Participants were given native plants to get to know and with whom to co-create nature mandalas as a practice of listening to, and learning from, the more than human world. It was an extraordinary day!
On Saturday, March 3 I had the opportunity to do a workshop with the cultural luminary, David Whyte through The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology's Alumni Lecture Series. Following are some of the thoughts and themes that came through our sharing, interaction, and play.
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When we listen deeply to the places that create our homescapes, our bioregions, we learn the stories of the land and create an imagination for how to mutually belong within these places. This practice of listening becomes a ritual in that it connects us to the great belonging within the community of creation, and also invites the Spirit to break in afresh, posturing us forward toward possibilities of a flourishing future. These are acts of remembrance and re-membering, practices that remind us of our interrelationship with the more-than-human world and bring us back into membership within this assembly.
The practice of listening in place will ultimately draw forth sorrow and lament, especially when one begins to attune to the silence of the beings (biodiversity) that are no longer there. How do we respond when the natural world no longer functions with resilience, when the bird’s song is still and the forests no longer refresh after the fires?
Where is the habitat of hope when the ice melts, the seas rise, and the forests burn? Can we find it in the silence? Will the still small voice call from within the wilderness, calling us to lean deeper into the silence and there find our true belonging?
Ecotheologian and ethicist Larry Rasmussen says it this way,
“We are not so much at home on earth, as we are home as earth.”
The integrity of the natural world renders our most basic and fundamental task: to live in such ways that ensure a flourishing and regenerative life for all of the created world and for all future generations within it. So how we live in our particular places does matter as we are meant to be in deep relationship with the whole assembly of creation. David Whyte's poetry guided us into an imagination for this relationship, a kind of dialogue with the natural world and the particularity of place that transforms one's soul. He spoke of this growing sense of interrelationship as a journey, a pilgrimage that would ultimately lead one to and through the most fundamental questions of life.
For me, my practice of of listening to my place has brought me to and through a question and process of acknowledging how my understanding of stewardship was based on superiority. My decades long urban forest restoration work hit a false floor; for me to continue to learn from this land, I had to engage in not just restoration, but personal deconstruction. And so I began the work of learning how my Whiteness granted me the privilege of choice to move to the Rainier Valley, and allowed my access to systems to change land policy. I had to confront the reality that white supremacy allowed me to be a steward of this land. And that even the theological idea of stewardship was one based on hierarchy, dominion, and power. I learned about how the oppression of the earth and the oppression of people are two sides of the same coin—you will not have liberation of one without the liberation of the other. My practice led me into important times of learning from tribal elders, who taught me that the land speaks. They showed me how they listen to the land. I began to realize that my understanding of stewardship had actually caused me to become deaf to the sacred soils of my particular place.
Stewarding this forest would only allow so much access to the spirit of this place. I had to begin the work, the practice of perceiving and participating within my bioregion. Bioregionalism is what environmental activist and poet Gary Snyder calls the “Spirit of Place.” To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is a whole. I began to reconstruct my understanding of Cheasty through a whole perspective, leaning into the wisdom and teaching inherent in the land. It is this process of listening into a place, or perception and participation of a place, that will reveal sacred stories and ultimately encourage a move towards solidarity and a deep sense of belonging within our bioregion. Bioregional awareness teaches us in specific ways.
Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place and it must be grounded in information and experience. Learning about the forest through the lens of sacred and storied ecology has not only taught me about the land, it has taught me how to be human and a member of an ecological community.
The lessons of the forest are those humanity need most right now.
Within this practice of knowing, we can find our habitat of hope. A habitat of hope acknowledges the suffering that Western stewardship has wielded that has resulted in the silencing and extinction of species, and it invites a new way of seeing, a new way of being that is in solidarity with the natural world. It is Aldo Leopold’s think like a mountain. I’ve found it as I’ve begun to think like a forest. It is looking at the landscape through the lenses of foundational power, intersectional engagement, and revelatory awareness so to bring us into a profound sense of home and belonging as the earth.
Through this workshop, David and I attempted to bring these lessons to the participants. We brought in elements from my homescape, lowland urban forest plants that were honorably harvested for workshop attendees to co-create nature mandalas, an activity that encourages a way of meeting and knowing the natural world that invites communion and revelatory understanding. The 13th century Japanese Buddhist priest, write, poet, and philosopher Dōgen once said,
“When you find your place where you are, practice occurs.”
The mandala, which is ancient Sanskrit for “circle,” is a symbolic circular design that portrays balance, symmetry, and wholeness. Mandalas are found in almost every culture, and can serve as a sacred reminder of the path we seek to walk. My nature mandalas, which I co-create monthly, are a continuing practice of learning the land—connecting to the plant and tree life that make up my homescape, learning from them of the medicine and food they offer, leaning into their seasonal stories, remembering our interrelatedness and meant-for-ness. This is a practice of forming what theologian Steven Bouma-Prediger calls an ecological perception of place. That is, a practice to get to know your ecology by becoming familiar over time with as many components of your ecology as you can. In other words, this is a practice of learning to listen and attune to storied and sacred land.
And so this workshop was one that brought us through the terrain of our imagination, a journey that led us to participate with the sacredness that is within the wild world that exists all around us. It was a time of inviting a profound shift in how we understand ourselves in relationship with the environment that values it for its inherent integrity and particular revelatory qualities.
I am deeply grateful to The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology for inviting me into this opportunity to share of my experience and learning, and to David for his willingness to share space with me in this context. May we all be inspired to engage this deep work of practicing listening in place!
