Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

Parker Palmer, known best to me through his book, The Courage to Teach, apparently has written on a number of other subjects. This is a slender volume -- just over 100 page -- and well worth the investment of time, at least to me. He talks I guess most thematically about self-acceptance--recognizing our weak as well as our strong points and embracing them as guideposts to finding what it is we are here on earth to do. And he is very clear that admiring someone for what they do or being told what we should do or aspiring to live up to the values of someone else or some institution outside ourselves is not the best guidance in finding our true calling. He is a Quaker, I think having come to that as an adult, although not entirely sure about that.
Palmer spends one whole chapter talking about what he learned from a couple of significant and lengthy encounters with clinical depression. There were several things that resonated for me, not only my own personal history with depression, but also my concerns about dealing with my sister's ongoing depression.  A few examples: "One begins the slow walk back to health by choosing each day things that enliven one's selfhood and resisting things that do not." "Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection..." He cites Rilke who says, "love...consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other." and goes on to say that "Rilke describes a kind of love that neither avoids nor invades the soul's suffering."  He said the therapist who he finally found to be helpful said at one point, " Do you think you could see it [depression]...as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to ground on which it is safe to stand?" And "One of the most painful discoveries I made in the midst of the dark woods of depression was that a part of me wanted to stay depressed. As long as I clung to this living death, lie became easier; little was expected of me, certainly not serving others." Finally, "One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to "fix" it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery. Standing there, we feel useless and powerlesss, which is exactly how a depressed person feels...In an effort to avoid those feelings, I give advice, which set me, not you, free."
I lingered over-long perhaps on that chapter, but there is much in the book that I found useful. I plan to buy a copy of this book so I can re-read it at my leisure, and maybe even loan it to a friend if the occasion arises.