Your Inner Design | PASSAGES :016
Thoughts on calling (part 1) and the parable of The Elder & the Stone
Wow, this has been… a week. Returning from spring break. Battling a cold. An assortment of kid’s commitments. Multiple meditation courses and a conference. A visit from out-of-town family. And, of course, making sure there’s time to watch Caitlin Clark.
Yes, these are my excuses for why this post is arriving in your inbox a few hours late this morning. But they’re not the only reasons… You see, I’ve started this post 3 or 4 times, only to get halfway and feel the complete absence of any wind in my sails. It was a bit discouraging.
But then it hit me: the problem isn’t that I have nothing to write about. The problem is I have too much to write about, and so it has all been coming out in a jumbled, confused mess.
That’s why I’ve decided to try something new here. So that I can actually explore the tangled ideas within me right now, I’m going to write a SERIES (A super novel idea, right?!). I’m not sure how long it will be, probably 4 or 5 posts, but the focus will be on one of my passions: vocation, or calling. It’s a big, broad topic and so I can’t say exactly where we’ll go with it, but I can tell you it will get personal (because I am IN IT right now with vocational questions) and we will no doubt talk about the little things like God and money - ha!
And now, to set us up, here is a story that serves as our series introduction…
The Elder & the Stone
The tribal elder brought the young men there to teach them the art before it was forgotten.
They had traveled many miles from their village, deep into the bush. Along the way he pointed out the land’s features to the young men. A gentle bend in the river. A particular grove of gum trees. A plateau in the distance. And then they arrived at the outcropping, a place that their ancestors had visited for thousands of years to listen to the stones.
The elder told them that this was a place of abundance, that for generations it had provided and prepared the quartz that became the flaked stone tools their people used everyday. Shaping tools for carving objects made of wood, bark, and bone. Scraping implements for crafting containers, cloaks, and decorative items out of animal skins. Spear tips and knives for hunting and butchering game.
The young men watched the elder’s weathered hands—hands that contained a secret knowledge—moving among the rocks that surrounded them. Occasionally, he would pick one up, each time carrying on a quiet conversation with that particular stone.
“This one will soon give birth, but she is not yet ready,” he said before setting down a stone.
He grabbed another one. “At the right time, this one will be very good.” But again, he gently placed it on the ground.
Then the young men saw a smile spread across the elder’s face. He cradled a stone in his hands. “Like a dream inside your mind, the flint lives inside this stone. Its essence, and the work it is meant to do, has been prepared inside the stone since the Dreamtime… Now it is ready to be born!”
Holding an egg-shaped rock in one hand—the hammerstone—the old man struck the quartz once. Then again, shattering the rock. After a few quick strikes, a moment later, he raised the newborn tool for all the young men to see.
The tool—for carving or scraping or hunting—had always been there. It just needed to be released from the rock by the wise elder so it could fulfill its purpose.
* Thank you to Robert Lawlor’s Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime for inspiring this story.