Keeping the Fire Alive
Staying true to your calling in a world that wants to grind you into dust
Dedication to craft. I love this. I love cultures where it happens, and I have great respect for people who follow their calling to the end of the line.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.'
- Goethe
This is more than a hobby. It’s being in touch with the heart of your desire. If each human being is a unique occurrence in the cosmos that has never happened before and never will again, then each person will have some kind of vocation they’re especially suited to, and some way in which the uniqueness of who they are will show itself as a gift. Doesn’t have to be a huge gift. Can be small. Can be the way a person lives. Can be in any field, from cookery to cosmology to felinology.
If one’s vocation is aligned closely to one’s calling, then you have a deep well of energy to draw on, but this well needs to be taken care of. If it isn’t, then a person’s a natural life force can sputter out, and you run the risk of becoming a ghost or a zombie. No élan vital. No flame of desire. I think it is alarmingly common.
My worst fear is to become like that. My greatest hope is the opposite.
Imagine: to be part of a community of people who simply will not let each other’s fires go out. In fact, they make concerted efforts to keep each other blazing, or to protect the embers when the darkness really hits - grief, apathy, fatigue, whatever.
Fragments of communities like this exist all over, often hidden in plain sight, embedded in the world at large. But the world at large (which we can imagine as ‘Boring Culture’, ‘the World of the Left Hemisphere’, ‘the Kingdom of Urizen’, ‘Western Civilisation’, ‘the Big Sleep’, ‘the Republic of Moloch’, ‘the Machine’ etc) tends to smother and separate, like a big hand reaching into the fire and scattering the embers to burn out on their own. My closest friends and family are dispersed over hundreds of miles. We are embedded in a culture of isolation where the technologies that supposedly connect us often make us more alone.
Given the demands work, child-care, daily chores and daily distractions, it is not easy to find time to keep in touch with one’s calling, assuming you even know what is it. You’d think education would help with this, but mainstream systems of education (themselves sub-sets of a larger military-industrial complex) are not set up to help people find the overlap between their calling and the needs of the world. (Note: For an incisive perspective on mainstream education, see Sir Ken Robinson’s Changing Education Paradigms - a short animated video.)
To keep the sacred fires burning in the scraps of time left to us is hard, and it’s even harder with all news-driven fear that most of us are marinated in. Yes, there are good reasons to be afraid, but there are just many good reasons to fall in love with world, and I don’t see those on the headlines. Combine that accumulation of fear with an over-abundance of Netflix and ice cream, then what you have is a daily battle of spiritual life and death.
Much easier, as Jeffrey Lewis says, to just relax or not exist.
Here are some of the things I’ve done over the years to keep the flame alive:
Write every day
Go into the woods almost every day
Spend more time with dead poets and philosophers than with news presenters
Use hard-work and cunning to avoid wage slavery at all costs
Live in the North East of England where houses are cheaper
Having liberated some amount of free time, try to be disciplined about how I use it
Balance discipline with play
Build an Internet-free workspace
Do meaningful part-time work that compliments writing (key ingredients being movement, nature, and being around other people, since writing is static, solo, and takes place inside a shed)
Run
Meditate
Journal
Study myth
A four day / four night fast in an ancient woodland
I mean, that makes me sound much more on it than I am. The other night, for example, my weakness for crisps displayed itself in colossal proportions. Made me think ‘Shit, I should start doing ice baths like Wim Hof. That’ll get me some crisp-discipline’.
Some people are naturally more driven to pursue a particular craft, but the craft itself isn’t the thing. There’s something deeper. Take a novelist, for example. The craft of writing is like the tree, the books are the fruit, but a greater force draws the oak from the acorn and keeps it reaching in two directions. Why are we drawn to particular vocations? In Ancient Greece, ‘calling’ was personified as a person’s daimon - a divine double who carries your uniqueness and pulls you towards it. Psychologist James Hillman elaborates in The Soul’s Code:
‘Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.
The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life – and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.’
It is not always a pleasant or relaxing experience to be pulled along by one’s daimon. Sometimes it feels like being chained to fifty foot bull who insists on moving at great speeds over many miles. But when you are moving together there comes a depth of joy and satisfaction, and a feeling of ‘rightness’ that cannot be found in any other way.
In writing this, I am riding with the bull. Our riding keeps the fire alive.
How in-touch with your calling do you feel? Do you have a vocation? How you keep the fire burning through the years?
I’ve gotten stuck in a place where my vocation has been usurped by my day job. Sure, I get paid for writing, which seems better than selling things or totaling up spreadsheets or just about any other wage slave job, but it’s not writing what’s in my heart or my soul, which makes it feel even worse sometimes. I am trying to break out, and I appreciate the inspiration and advice here. I’m not going to take an ice bath, and there are no woods hereabouts, but journaling and mediation are helping me lay my cunning plans for escape.
I'm so pleased to see another 'edition'(?) of TABC. Thank you for this, Ben.
I feel some of these things very keenly: I have the luxury of time, being almost completely retired, and I strive to use it well, but there is so much that calls to me, the general clamour can be intimidating, in I completely agree that it takes discipline to remain focused on one's calling.
The good news is I just completed my third Quirk & Moth novel and sent the copy edits away yesterday; 10 months of hard graft, but I still think of the time I frittered away on the internet (maybe 50% of my online time is not productive?).
Even with the significant undertaking of a novel completed, I feel the urge to keep going, keep writing, commit to the next thing as soon as possible. Time is everything, possibly the only thing we truly own, and it is alway running out. Carpe diem.