## Metadata - Author: [[Parker J. Palmer]] - Full Title: Let Your Life Speak - Category: #books ## Highlights - "Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent." ([Location 65](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=65)) - There may be moments in life when we are so unformed that we need to use values like an exoskeleton to keep us from collapsing. But something is very wrong if such moments recur often in adulthood. ([Location 70](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=70)) - Verbalizing is not the only way our lives speak, of course. They speak through our actions and reactions, our intuitions and instincts, our feelings and bodily states of being, perhaps more profoundly than through our words. We are like plants, full of tropisms that draw us toward certain experiences and repel us from others. If we can learn to read our own responses to our own experience-a text we are writing unconsciously every day we spend on earth-we will receive the guidance we need to live more authentic lives. ([Location 93](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=93)) - How we are to listen to our lives is a question worth exploring. In our culture, we tend to gather information in ways that do not work very well when the source is the human soul: the soul is not responsive to subpoenas or cross-examinations. At best it will stand in the dock only long enough to plead the Fifth Amendment. At worst it will jump bail and never be heard from again. The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. ([Location 104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=104)) - I find it a bit embarrassing that as this chapter ends, I am drawing the reader not toward silence but toward speech, page after page of speech! I hope that my speech is faithful to what I have heard, in the silence, from my soul. And I hope that the reader who sits with this book can hear the silence that always surrounds us in the writing and reading of words. It is a silence that forever invites us to fathom the meaning of our lives-and forever reminds us of depths of meaning that words will never touch. ([Location 110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=110)) - In those early days of my granddaughter's life, I began observing the inclinations and proclivities that were planted inher at birth. I noticed, and I still notice, what she likes and dislikes, what she is drawn toward and repelled by, how she moves, what she does, what she says.I am gathering my observations in a letter. When my granddaughter reaches her late teens or early twenties, I will make sure that my letter finds its way to her, with a preface something like this: "Here is a sketch of who you were from your earliest days in this world. It is not a definitive picture-only you can draw that. But it was sketched by a person who loves you very much. Perhaps these notes will help you do sooner something your grandfather did only later: remember who you were when you first arrived and reclaim the gift of true self." ([Location 136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=136)) - The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. "Faking it" in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one's nature, and it will always fail. ([Location 178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=178)) - True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need"3 ([Location 182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=182)) - The Quaker teacher Douglas Steere was fond of saying that the ancient human question "Who am l?" leads inevitably to the equally important question "Whose am l?"-for there is no selfhood outside of relationship. ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=186)) - I saw that as an organizer I had never stopped being a teacher-I was simply teaching in a classroom without walls.In fact, I could have done no other: teaching, I was coming to understand, is my native way of being in the world. Make me a cleric or a CEO, a poet or a politico, and teaching is what I will do. Teaching is at the heart of my vocation and will manifest itself in any role I play. Georgetown's invitation allowed me to take my first step toward embracing this truth, toward a lifelong exploration of "education unplugged." ([Location 226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=226)) - A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it. But I have always wanted to think my own thoughts about a subject without being overly influenced by what others have thought before me. If you catch one reading a book in private, it is most likely to be a novel, some poetry, a mystery, or an essay that defies classification, rather than a text directly related to whatever I am writing at the time. ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=277)) - Today I serve education from outside the institution-where my pathology is less likely to get triggered-rather than from the inside, where I waste energy on anger instead ofinvesting it in hope. This pathology, which took me years to recognize, is my tendency to get so conflicted with the way people use power in institutions that I spend more time being angry at them than I spend on my real work. ([Location 293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=293)) - Where do people find the courage to live divided no more when they know they will be punished for it? The answer I have seen in the lives of people like Rosa Parks is simple: these people have transformed the notion of punishment itself. They have come to understand that no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment. ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=341)) - Our problem as Americans-at least, among my race and gender-is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives. Our national myth is about the endless defiance of limits: opening the western frontier, breaking the speed of sound,dropping people on the moon, discovering "cyberspace" at the very moment when we have filled old-fashioned space with so much junk that we can barely move. ([Location 414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001C34LL8&location=414))