Hearing The Call, Finding Your Voice

Last week I wrote about the call that initiates us on our own personal hero’s journey and suggested that sometimes that calling takes the form, initially, of depression. According to Jungian analyst, Aldo Carotenuto, the symbol of the call is “the image of the person who breaks with the past, his or her preceding life, and sets out on a journey in the attempt to find the self.” 

In her poem titled The Journey, Mary Oliver creates a beautiful image of exactly this process, picturing it in terms of the metaphor of finding your voice. In this post, I will use Oliver’s poem to explore more deeply the pilgrimage that is begun when the call is heard that marks a break with a way of being that has been outlived — the pilgrimage of finding your voice. 

Hearing The Call

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Speaking with one’s own true voice is one of the hardest things for a person to achieve for the simple reason that it is one of the most difficult things to hear. In our initial attempts to listen within, it is most likely that we will hear a thousand other voices long before we can discern our own.

When listening for the voice that will tell us who we are, we first of all hear those voices telling us who we “should” be, the voices of our families telling us how they wanted us to be, the voices of shame and derision that followed any expression of our inner self, or the voices of fear and insecurity that come with the awareness that stepping into our uniqueness means taking responsibility for our own lives.

The process of finding your voice is a journey, writes Mary Oliver. In other words, it is not something that happens all at once, for good and forever. It is a journey that begins with the difficult and frightening process of leaving behind all that we have been. 

The initial awareness of our own voice, according to Oliver, does not necessarily come with any sound. Almost like a calling without words, it can be a sudden knowing that the voices we have been listening to and following are not our own:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible. 

Too Many Voices

It is not an uncommon experience to suddenly realize that so many of the building blocks on which one has based one’s life are the ideals and values of others. As Joseph Campbell once taught:

“The crucial thing to live for is the sense of life in what you are doing, and if that is not there, then you are living according to other people’s notions of how life should be lived.” 

As human beings we are subject to a lot of bad advice, be it from our families with their expectations and desires for us, from our culture with its prescribed and standardized ways of being, or from our peers and their need for us to validate their choices through our own.

Each of these spheres, consciously or unconsciously, makes their demands on us; we feel from them “the old tug at our ankles.” Those around us may object to any move on our parts away from their field of influence. As Oliver puts it, “the whole house begins to tremble” in protest.  

The world in which we live—our culture, family, or social sphere—often requires us to sacrifice our own well-being to maintain the collective cohesion of the group. “Mend my life!,” they all cry. It is a difficult plea to ignore.

Finding Your Voice Takes Courage

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It is not just those around us who begin to tremble, but some part of ourselves as well. Finding your voice means separating from the influence of the others in your life and that is frightening, stirring up one’s deepest feelings of responsibility.  

Often it can feel as if our very survival depends on keeping those around us happy so that they will continue to love us. We can become terrified of making any kind of change; it feels as if “the wind pries at our stiff fingers” such that we can barely maintain our resolve to move ahead.

Often, though, it is when the absence of our own voice drowns out the clamor of the other voices around us, that we may at last find we have the courage to become deaf to all these demands and to make room for our own needs, our own longings, our own voice to come through. 

When this moment comes, writes Mary Oliver, we must grapple with the fear that we may have begun this move too late in our lives and that the obstacles we have to overcome are too great:  

It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones. 

Finding a Place In The World

Entering this place of fear and the unknown, what I referred to in a previous post as “entering the silence,” seems to be a necessary first step to being able to hear the first stirrings of our true voice:

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Oliver’s The Journey presents a striking picture of many of the struggles my clients will often bring into the therapeutic encounter. On some level, each individual is struggling with the problem of finding his or her voice, of saving his or her life, and of moving deeper into an engagement with the world.  

Mary Oliver’s poem teaches us that these three elements: the quality of your life, your engagement with the world, and finding your voice are all connected, all of a piece. It is essential for each of us to be able to speak our own truth, if we are to find our place in the world.

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