with no medium

in this quest for identity and purpose, i'm rereading parker j. palmer's let your life speak. it's been one of the most influential books in my life, and i recommend it to anyone sharing in the pilgrimage of vocation and identity.

in chapter 2, palmer is sharing some autobiographics of his journey of discovering vocation. he was working as a community organizer in washington dc when he was offered a faculty position at georgetown university. palmer writes:

"by looking anew at my community work through the lens of education, 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."

this got me pondering: what is my natural way of being in the world? what is it that i will do no matter what else i'm doing?

in my first read of this book, i thought it was teaching for me also. which may be partially true, but only partially. i think teaching is an interest that i've intentionally developed. i'm passionate about education, about the teaching/learning interchange, about the dynamic relationships among teacher, student, and subject matter, about different teaching methods and learning styles, about explicit, implicit, and null curricula. and i enjoy teaching and preparing lessons. but i don't think teaching runs so deeply in me that i could say it's my "native way of being in the world."

in reflecting further on the questions of who i am no matter what else i'm doing, i came to this exciting and terrifying conclusion: i am an artist.

immediately, disclaimers rise to object. i'm not a good or talented artist. i'm not a carver or a basket weaver. i'm not a fiber artist or a potter. i'm not a composer or a dancer. i'm not a poet or novelist. i'm not a painter or a sculptor. i can't even doodle really.

but nevertheless, i am an artist. that is my way of being in the world. my deepest desire is to create, to make things new. i long to put form and shape to raw materials. i see the world with infinite potential for beauty. i treasure symbolism and metaphor and find it more deeply meaningful and real and true than actual "reality." i imagine wonderful things and long for them to be. imagination. creativity. art. now that i've put words to it, it seems so obvious to me. it makes so much sense.

palmer explains that if you are having trouble figuring out who you are, you should "remember who you were when you first arrived and reclaim the gift of true self...when we lose track of true self, how can we pick up the trail? one way is to seek clues in stories from our younger years, years when we lived closer to our birthright gifts."

in just about every memory of my childhood, there is some element of make believe. the walkway leading to my front door was a river of lava that i could use to carry messages written with pokeberry juice on dogwood leaves. broccoli was a tiny tree, and i was a huge, devouring dinosaur. i was a designer of beautiful gowns for teddy bears, and my mom was the seamstress charged with making my dreams reality. i was a mermaid princess living in a lake with mystical clay on the bottom which carried magical powers. i was always making up songs about nature and God and life and love and envisioning myself as a great performer.

you might say that these are the dreams of every little girl, and you're probably right. but i hold that the eye and the will to see things as they could be and ought to be and not only how they are, the mind and heart shaping things according to all their potential beauty, the hands longing to bring form and magnificence to something dull and shapeless but perhaps falling short of their vision due to a lack of dexterity and skill...these are the joys and challenges, the bumps and bruises, the curses and privileges of some sort of artist, the heartbeat of a creator.

as exciting a discovery as this is, i'm overwhelmed. i'm saddened. because i am an artist in search of a medium. i am unskilled, untrained, undeveloped. i have the blessing of beautiful ideas in my head and the millstone of very poor follow-through around my neck. the wounds of "less than" of "not measuring up creatively" run deep. and i don't know where to start.

as it turns out, this journey of self discovery isn't about interspection. these moments of revelation are not the destination. the goal and purpose behind these questions is not to just "figure it all out." if an artist is who i am, to become who i am will not be fulfilled simply because i've named the artist in me. to name myself is only giving direction to the journey. so what is the next step? if i desire to move forward, how can i proceed? how can i proactively become myself even in this place of waiting, waiting, waiting?