“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done . . . you are fierce with reality.”

– Florida Scott Maxwell

The essay in Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, “All the Way Down,” focuses on his personal journey through depression, and the connection between depression and vocation. Palmer’s courage to share his personal experience with depression makes me feel less alone in my journey to understand and make peace with all that I am and live that in the world. Palmer offers his therapist’s image for depression to invite us into his understanding. After many hours of “careful listening,” his therapist explained, “You seem to look upon depression as the hand of the enemy trying to crush you. Do you think you could instead see it as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to the ground on which it is safe to stand?” Palmer explains this image, “helped me reclaim my life.” He connects this image with wholeness, mystery, truth, compassion.

That image makes me think of flower bulbs. It makes me think of our need for careful tending. It makes me think of the safety and nourishment of fertile soil. It makes me think of the beauty and power of our true self. It also makes me think of the natural rhythm of life – the falling apart and coming back together, the falling apart and coming back together, the falling apart and coming back together — like seasons. Flower bulbs embody potential and hope and fierce (and somehow gentle) reality.

Palmer ends this essay with a poem. He explains:

“I offer it, along with my unknowing, as a token of hope to anyone who may be enduring the harrowing of depression.

Harrowing

The plow has savaged this sweet field/Misshapen clods of earth kicked up/Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view/Last year’s growth demolished by the blade./I have plowed my life this way/Turned over a whole history/Looking for the roots of what went wrong/Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.//Enough. The job is done./Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be/Seedbed for growing that’s to come./I plowed to earth last year’s reasons – //The farmer plows to plant a greening season.