The Painful, Confusing Ache of "the Call"

When you can't explain to anyone why you're feeling the way you are

A long, long time ago, around evening fires and while harvesting food, the elders passed down to us the knowledge of “the call.”

Through stories of adventure, danger, and magic we learned about what might happen when our destinies beckoned.

We learned about the pain that we would feel.

We learned about the sadness of no longer feeling at home where we’d grown up, the grief that we’d have to leave people and see their grief, the ache of the uncertainty, and the fear of the unknown.

We learned about the courage that would be required to follow our path when the path was entirely unclear.

Nature has patterns in the outer world and the inner world. Humans have been observing those patterns for millennia.

We learn so little about any of that anymore.

During a retreat for Quarterlifers that I recently led on San Juan Island,

Leslie Stephens

brought along her copy of “The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver”. I chose to read a favorite poem from this collection to the group.

Do you know it? It goes like this.

"The Journey"

One day you finally knew
What you had to do, and began,
Though the voices around you
Kept shouting
Their bad advice‚
Though the whole house
Began to tremble
And you felt the old tug
At your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
Each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
Though the wind pried
With its stiff fingers
At the very foundations‚
Though their melancholy
Was terrible.
It was already late
Enough, and a wild night,
And the road full of fallen
Branches and stones.
But little by little,
As you left their voices behind,
The stars began to burn
Through the sheets of clouds,
And there was a new voice,
Which you slowly
Recognized as your own,
That kept you company
As you strode deeper and deeper
Into the world,
Determined to do
The only thing you could do‚
Determined to save
The only life you could save.

Today, it is often poets and artists who help us remember the natural patterns of the world.

Mary Oliver’s poem speaks in modern prose to the painful ache that initiates “the journey of individuation,” as Carl Jung named it. A journey that is made far more difficult when we don’t know its name or know when it has arrived.

The journey of individuation is the call to listen to our own life and destiny, however confusing; the call to disappoint others in favor of an inner demand, however unclear; the call to turn away from the group and towards the self because the pain of silencing the self only increases over time until the anguish can barely be endured.

At root, this is the story of my book. In the beginning, it is the need to Separate. It is so hard to explain to oneself or others when we don’t have the words.

This instinct in humans is the same one that pulls a wolf away from its pack in search of a new stage of life, to find a mate and establish a new community. The only difference is that a wolf’s behavior is not at odds with their culture.

Most of us humans, on the other hand, are far more like caged animals. Despite the amount of territory we dominate and the amount of freedom to move that so many people (not all people) possess, we have been largely trained to believe that any yearnings we feel in our bodies for “something else” are probably wrong. If it cannot be rationally explained, it is nonsense. If it cannot be defined and mapped out and monetized, it is to be ignored.

And yet, those yearnings may be pointing us towards the most joyful evolution of our own lives—and of the planet too.

Another poet, Audre Lorde, puts this beautifully in her essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” (I read from this at the retreat too.) She refers to this instinct, this yearning, this life force, as the Erotic.

“When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs… we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone on an individual’s. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness that so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.”

Trusting our paths, however unclear, spreads roots for the development of moral and emotional courage.

By learning to trust the instinctive, non-rational knowledge and let it lead us, step-by-step, where it wants to go, we learn to trust Nature itself. We begin to transform our inner loyalties away from the dominant cultural demands for conformity and linear growth that have created so much suffering and back towards harmony with life itself. By defending the subtle calls of our own lives, we learn to defend a different kind of knowledge in the face of our fear and the disappointment and doubts of others.

To step into that battle requires courage. It isn’t a courage of violence or fighting but of defending one’s quietest self against the loudest voices and more demanding needs of others.

Dominant culture trains us so thoroughly in “rational” education that some of the most natural parts of our bodies and instincts are made to appear insane. What we feel is insane within us, we often try to repress.

The only problem is that psychological repression isn’t a solution. Repressing something unsettling within the psyche is like trying to hide a body in shallow sand. It’s only a matter of time before it reemerges and causes alarm.

The phone will keep ringing, as it tries desperately to reach us. The magnet will keep magnetizing us toward something in our future, struggling to pull us somewhere else. The more we seek to muffle these “irrational” feelings, the more physical and emotional symptoms will arise. Addictions, obsessions, and neuroses will take hold in a further attempt to bury what cannot be buried.

So what do we do instead?

We trust that one does not need to be Harry Potter or a “hero” or a nun to hear “the call.” That nature has patterns in the inner world that require, at times, departures from what we’ve known, even if we can’t explain why.

We practice believing that the culture in which we’re immersed is what’s “off,” not the clear knowledge we feel about the life we want to live and the world that wants to come into being.

We imagine a world in which the nature of our bodies is not at odds with the lives that we live.

And we allow ourselves to trust the call, if and when it comes.