the call, the work

In the letter last week I wrote intimately about having a sense of vocation. Someone who reads the letter asked a question. I thought I would address it here so that you have an idea of what arises from the letter.  He asked,

Can a call be crafted? 

There is a certain kind of work that I feel called to. Part of that work right now is walking into the Mysore room (nearly) every morning. Part of that work is writing. But the call is not the work itself. In fact, if a vocation feels like a magnetic pull toward a certain kind of work, then the work itself feels like forcing the same poles of two magnets together. The vocation is the pull, it is the call. And, “as powerful as is our soul’s call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against it.”* That is where the work comes. The work comes with the Resistance.

So does vocation move, as the poet Ruth Stone suggested, like a thunderous train of air, barreling over the landscape and plowing through our bodies whether we are ready to capture it or not? Or does vocation merely hint at itself, casting a shadow of suggestion across our vision with hopes we have the dedication and resource to nurture and beg it’s embodiment?

If it’s the former then, like Stone, you are running like hell down the hill to catch it before it disappears. If the latter you are bent over the page (or tool or idea or child) with only the spare hope that you will bear the fruit. Either way, it is the work that precedes and follows the call and it is the work that must be done.

*Stephen Pressfield, The War of Art

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