I have been contemplating what to do with my life, all my life. Here is a short list of professions I became enamored with from childhood to young adulthood:
Author - age 7 (and maybe still current?)
Painter - age 13
Middle school art teacher - age 14
Particle physicist (a girl can dream) - age 15
Youth pastor - age 16
Regular pastor - age 17
Genetic counselor - age 18
Doctor - age 18
Farmer - age 19
Museum curator - age 20
Taxidermist - age 21
Journalist - age 22 (the grad school years)
This week I accepted a position with Alaska Wilderness League as their communications manager.
You may notice that “communications manager” never once appeared as a desired profession during my adolescence.
It is very difficult to explain to a child that you can in fact make a profession of loving this gorgeous earth, of grieving everything that is and may be lost, and that that profession title might be something like “communications manager.” It’s not very romantic, and some days it’s more Tweets than standing out on the dirt you’re so desperate to save. But it is, at the end of the day, yours. Your opportunity for grace. Your chance to sway heavy, hardened hearts. Your glimmering window to something like love. Maybe even actual honest to god love.
It is very difficult to express this even to my adult self.
In his book Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez asks, “What does it mean to grow rich? Is it to have red-blooded adventures and to make a fortune…Or is it, rather, to have a good family life and to be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one’s homeland…Is it to retain a capacity for awe and astonishment in our lives, to continue to hunger after what is genuine and worthy? Is it to live at moral peace with the universe?”
I have spent the last five months asking myself many different iterations of this question. Even Lopez himself says in the very next paragraph that “It is impossible to know, clearly, the answer to this question.”
But I think we do know.
From where I lay in the camper, growing rich sounds like being able to roll over in bed and not shake the entire house. It sounds like finding the work I do to pay the rent meaningful, while also leaving time and space to be a farmer, painter, author — heck, maybe even a particle physicist.
When I look at this new job, the body of work, the ability it provides to move back to Colorado, the lasting impact it will have on the land and also the people who inhabit that land, I feel closer than ever to retaining a capacity for awe and astonishment in my life, hungering after what is genuine and worthy. I feel closer to living at moral peace with the universe.
When it comes to work and careers and professions, I don’t have any of the answers. Each generation is redefining what it means to work and work meaningfully and I believe we’re finally trending in the right direction, but there’s still a very long way to go.
As I creep up on my Saturn Return and the stunning slant into a new decade of life, I would like to grow rich in slowness, in awe and astonishment, in worthiness, in grounding, in place and in time.
Lopez says that the “universe is oddly hinged.” I imagine it creaking open like an old door, letting in so much light. So much richness.