Defined: To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to affirm our community’s health, dignity, and humanity.
We are significantly powerful and powerfully insignificant.
Where did you lose yourself? It often happens in childhood.
Think about this: when a baby is born, we say “awwww” at every little thing they do. But as they get older, they get told “no” quite a bit. Children’s perceived mischievousness is just their attempt at learning about the world around them, what feels good / doesn’t feel good to them, testing boundaries left and right. The world tells them “no” out of a perceived sense of discipline or respectability. From toddlerhood on, we learn in so many ways that it is not okay to follow our instincts, to explore, to be curious, to trust ourselves.
The idea of purpose can be scary. It seems loaded with responsibility and expectation, causing a sense of existential dread over the thought that one has not “figured out their life’s purpose.”
I know the dread here. I feel the fear here. I remember the pain here.
The word vocation – the place where the work that one feels drawn to in their spirit is work that also meets a need of the world around them. In this context, a vocation is not simply a job, but in the words of Audre Lorde, “The aim of each thing we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision – a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.”
The invitation of Nia is tapping into the inevitability of our purpose. Our purpose flows inevitably from our authenticity.
In Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, she invites the reader into a conversation about erotic authenticity. Erotic – which is to say, that animating force that fuels our living, our desires, our survival. The erotic is the seat of our deepest knowing. Without having read, without the influence and input of others, we know what we feel. We know who we are.
Purpose can be scary to think about because purpose is often represented as something outside of ourselves, something we must pursue, something outside of what we feel. It is a source of anxiety and feeling like time is running out.
But could it be? You were and are always right on time, beloved.
Care Reflections
What do you desire for yourself? What does your heart want? Can you believe you are worthy of having these things?
How does that desire / want speak to your vocation?
-Images & Writing By Vic Collins