This month's soul story
How to find your purpose
Hello you,
I’d like to share a story with you.
When I first heard it, I was struck by a deep and incomprehensible longing to change what I considered was ‘my hard-won purpose’ in life; having suffered through many poorly chosen careers to eventually become a writer at a rather salty age.
This story has time and time again brought me home to what is most important to me, and I hope it offers you a little something too.
Like all stories that touch us, every aspect represents a piece of you. Much like dreams and poetry speak to us through the language of the soul, so is it that stories make healing possible by providing us with a mirror that we may see the nature of our Hearts through.
(you can listen to this story by pressing the play button below the picture)
This story comes from a time when those of us who reached a certain age were also considered of no further use to the community. As if our usefulness were a finite thing and drained from us along with the color of our hair.
In this time of valuing only what was perfect and new and youthful, a local community enforced a strict law that exiled its elderly members once they had reached ‘a certain age’.
On the eve of one old man’s exile, a small family who lived on the outskirts of the community prepared to send their father off into the deep dark forest. He had been instructed to carry very little with him and to walk as far into the wilds as it would take to lose himself. The family lamented over their coming loss, unable to accept the cruelty of their community’s law.
The following morning, as the old man left his home for good, his daughter and son walked him to the black-rimmed edge of the pine forest. They followed him as he entered the small passageway that burrowed into the thick woodland but unable to leave him alone, the son and daughter continued to accompany him as he sank deeper and deeper into the density of pine.
The journey was quiet, only interrupted by the deep brush of wind that occasionally combed through the canopy or the sudden draft lifting the skirt of the forest floor.
The old man walked on steadily, in a state of peace until the children noticed something strange…
Their father was peeling off thick rivets of bark from every other tree, laying them down on the ground precisely in a way that pointed the sharp end of the bark North.
After a while, the children, confused and distressed, reminded their father that he was not allowed to return back to the community and that his efforts in marking his way home again would be in vain.
To which, the father turned and responded lovingly to his children;
“I am not marking my way back home…”
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You will forever and always have a deeply meaningful reason for being here. This purpose doesn’t leave you and you don’t find it anywhere outside of you.
It is not what you do for a job, nor what gifts and traits you have… it is not even what you offer the world -
but how you offer it.
How you live is your purpose.
We think of purpose as such a heavy and finite thing, something to be attained if we are to ever be happy - as if we will be banished to those lonely places if we do not have it by a certain age.
But it is not a thing, a culturally acceptable contribution, a legacy left when you’re gone…it is a living, breathing, animate way of being in this world that affects everyone we come into contact with.
The meaning behind this story
Within this story, the community with its strict rules is our overbearing culture that decides what is worthy. The need for newness and perfection is our own internalization of what we see being celebrated in that culture.
The dark woods are our unconscious shadows. We often exile ourselves unto them due to our one-way thinking. These dead-end beliefs tell us we are too old, too inexperienced, not enough this, or too much of that; limiting the freedom we need to be ourselves.
The children are our innocence; that dual part of us that loves beyond reason and cannot abandon what they know is more experienced, more weathered, more scarred, and therefore wiser than themselves. They are the underveloped parts of us that obey without question.
The old man is our wiser self - the masculine part of our energy that acts intentionally. He is the part within us that remains calm, clear-headed, and resilient.
The bark we strip is harvested from our wilder selves because that part of us intuitively knows that our life is not our own but a map for many others to use.
When we send ourselves out to pasture because of a limiting belief, we rob ourselves and others of what makes us most useful.
Our purpose is our how. How we work, how we raise our children, how we plant our gardens, how we pour our tea. It is how we use our words, oh, how we use our words…
To me, this story asks me to reflect on how I am showing up in my world and not what is currently going on in my world. It asks me to reflect on how I am healing my trauma, not what my trauma was.
So let us focus less on what is happening to us all right now and more on how we are bearing that weight, how we are healing that ache, and how we are marking our way through uncertainty because every heart leaves its legacy.
In awe of you and the journey that lives within you,
Sez
You might enjoy a new private podcast I have created, called Remembering Wild. I offer weekly recordings of soul-lifting stories and poetry. It’s 7 dollars a month and allows me to spend time creating a safe space outside of social media. I am so grateful for all ways you feel called to support my work, nothing passes me without sincere respect and love for your time and effort.