Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

In this honest and compelling meditation, Parker Palmer reflects upon vocation, spirit, and the life journey with a depth of insight that will touch anyone who yearns for an authentic way of standing and serving in the world. Finding one’s calling is not just about finding something we can do—it is about finding what we can’t not do. “Let your life speak” is a time-honored Quaker admonition to live one’s life as witness to the deepest truths one knows. But as Palmer explains, those words can also mean “listen to your life, and let it tell you what your truth is.” Vocation, he writes, comes not from external demands but from listening to the “true self,” a listening that will always call us into some form of service to others.

As Palmer’s many readers know, his writing has always been grounded in his own life experience; here he speaks even more vulnerably of his own times of being lost in the dark—as well as moments of stumbling into the light—in his own quest for vocation. Though the details of his journey are singular, he draws from it that which is universal. The result is a moving and illuminating book for anyone who seeks not just a job but a calling and companionship along the way.