For now - I've been reflecting more on calling/lifestyle/life's work. This has been stirring partly because of a L'Arche Team Leaders Circle Retreat that I went on, so I'll keep it here on this blog about my "life with folks with disabilities". That, and because this is really my "current" blog. Of course, none of my life is really "life without folks with disabilities" - so it all counts, I suppose.
The week started with an actual Retreat day (it's actually a week of Formation/Training, but in a retreat setting). And we started the day hearing a story read aloud to us (love!). Sarah Thomson read us "Living Like Weasels" by Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I'm not sure if this story/essay/entry is in Tinker Creek, but it's by Annie.
It starts out with lots of gory details about weasels killing other animals, one even trying to kill an eagle. And I thought "what the hell? Why is she telling us these things?" I do love a good gory animal story about animals being animals (for example: Mary Rose O'Reilly's graphic description of castrating rams on a commercial sheep farm in Barn at the End of the World). However, I was a little put-off and puzzled at first with this sharing on our Retreat Day.
By the end of the story, I got the picture. Annie applies her first-hand encounter, learnings and musings about weasels - to vocation.
She invites us to "live like weasels" - to get in touch with our animal selves, to follow our innermost necessity and desire.
She describes weasels as "obedient to instinct" - they go for the jugular or base of the skull, because that's what they do. They don't overthink, consider where in the larger picture of the food chain they exist. They go for the jugular - period.
She suggests that we could live like a weasel - we could, any one of us, choose to "go wild."
I love this: "The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't 'attack' anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity."
To stalk your calling. To yield. Single necessity.
"...to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you...Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles."
I'm wondering what it looks and feels like to "pay attention," to tap into "what is essential" for oneself (these were the key invitations for reflection for the day) - such that one is so in tune with one's "single necessity" and can yield to it. What are the practices that do and will help me pay attention? What would it look like for me to yield to single necessity, to respond to my calling with complete abandon?
We explored some common practices of folks who pay good attention, and I explored some of my own. As I attempt to tend to these practices, I hope to "live like a weasel." I think I've had some pretty keen "weasel" moments already in life - I don't know how else I would have gotten here. And I hope to let my "weasel" self lead me in each next phase.
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