The Image of a Life

In essence

Every life carries within it an image seeking to be lived.
Calling belongs to the whole life and is larger than any single form it takes.
A life may give the image many forms through which to be expressed.
In living the image, something latent in us is revealed.
We recognise it in what returns, what moves us, and what continues to call us toward life.
The world may participate in the revelation of the image. In certain places, relationships, forms of work and encounters, something within us that has remained silent begins to speak.
The meaning of a calling can only be revealed within the particular life that carries it.
To recognise the image is to recognise something of who we are here to be.

There was a woman calling me
I knew her when I was a little girl
She sought expression through me
But as I grew, from her I fell
She kept returning in all sorts of forms
Whispering a life I was born to live.

—Immaculate Conception of Being

Perhaps the deepest task of a life is to recognise the image that belongs to it.

The image is not a single task, role or vocation. It is something a life carries from the beginning, returning through different forms until it is recognised and revealed.

Yet the image never gives itself to us all at once. We know it by glimpses: through what returns, what strangely moves us, what feels remembered. Even as it reveals itself, something of it remains hidden.

Perhaps this is part of its mystery. We do not stand outside the image and decipher it. We come to know it by living the life through which it reveals itself.

Calling feels less like something we dream for ourselves

and more like something that dreams through us, seeking life.

…as if he was determined to dream in me,
the dream of his very own heart.

—God, the Dreamer

Calling is larger than what we do with our lives. It is about what living reveals in us.

Qualities of character, capacities, ways of seeing and ways of being may exist in us long before they find the conditions through which they can appear.

As the image takes form, so do we.

Yet we are often taught to understand our lives from the outside. We look at circumstances, probabilities and outcomes. We ask what is sensible, secure, profitable or realistic. We look at what happened to other people and imagine that their experience can tell us what will happen to us.

Such knowledge has its place. But it cannot contain the meaning of a particular life.

Calling asks us to read a life from within.

What is the image of this particular life? What draws this person again and again? What qualities of character are trying to come forward? Through what work, places, relationships or ways of being does something essential in them find its way into the world?

James Hillman wrote of the daimon, the image carried by a life, the particular pattern seeking expression through an individual existence. Jung approached this particularity through individuation: the movement toward becoming more fully oneself rather than remaining unconsciously shaped by the prescriptions of the collective.

A life does not merely express who we already know ourselves to be. Through living it, what was latent in us may be revealed.

A man may spend his life working with his hands and be told that freedom means escaping his work. Yet his work may give him vitality, independence, mastery, human connection and the feeling of being fully himself. He may have no desire to retire from something that continues to give him life.

From the outside, we see what a person does.

From within, we see what the work calls forth in the person.

The image of a life is larger than any single form it takes.

We often ask, What am I meant to do? Where am I meant to live? What form should my life take? as though calling must resolve itself into a single answer.

But the image is not in service to these forms. The forms are in service to the image.

A profession may give it expression. A place may awaken it. A relationship may deepen it. A business, a body of work or a particular project may become one of the forms through which it enters the world.

Some forms may accompany us for decades;

others may belong intensely to one chapter before giving way to another.

From the outside, these forms may appear to have little in common.

Yet the continuity of a life is not necessarily found in what we do or how it appears. It may lie in the image moving through it, finding different forms through which to be lived.

The deeper order of a life may only become visible from within its image.

The same is true of place.

There is a language within us, and there is a language within places. At times, the two enter communion.

I have known this most intimately through Italy.

Italy lived within me growing up: in the women I admired as a little girl, in the forms of beauty that moved me, in old streets and grand buildings, in the sea and mountains, in its microcosms and in images of a life that felt more remembered than invented.

Over time, as I returned and spent more of my life there, that recognition deepened.

What had existed as intimation became vivid. I wrote. I created. My perception sharpened. Possibilities awakened that elsewhere had remained asleep.

Now, having made a home there, the relationship has taken on another form. What once lived at the edge of imagination has entered the fabric of my life. Something of eternity and wonder continues to open before me.

In one place, whole dimensions of the self, one’s own inner language, may remain unknown, without voice, silent; in another, something within us begins to speak.

We can know a place’s difficulties, limitations and possibilities. But none of this can tell us what that place may mean in the unfolding of another’s life.

The meaning of a place within a life is revealed through the unfolding of that life.

Others can tell us what a place has been in their life. They cannot tell us what it may be in ours.

What of my life is asking to be revealed there?

The same mystery reaches beyond geography, into work, love, marriage, ambition, creativity and the choices through which a life takes form.

Another person’s experience can inform us without defining us.

There comes a point at which their knowledge ends and our own life begins.

The meaning of a calling can only reveal itself within the life that carries it.

Before asking what we should do, where we should live or what work we should choose,

perhaps there is a more intimate question:

Do I recognise the image of my own life?

Without that recognition, it is easy to inherit definitions of freedom, success, security and happiness without knowing whether they belong to the life we carry.

But as the image reveals itself, our relationship with the world changes.

We begin to notice what answers it.

And with that recognition can come a sudden enlargement of life. The spirit is stirred by the intimation that our existence contains more possibility than we had allowed ourselves to imagine. Not grandeur in the sense of importance, but the grandeur of discovering that one’s life may have a destiny of its own.

There are places still to find, work still to create, encounters still to have, and parts of ourselves still waiting to enter the world.

It restores a sense of destiny.

Calling may reveal itself through relationship: in the work that gives us life, the people who enlarge us, the places that awaken us, the forms of beauty that call something forward from within.

The inner image meets the world, and a conversation begins.

And sometimes what is required of us appears only afterwards, when we look back at the movement of a life:

to overcome meant to depart;
to depart meant to trust;
to trust meant to see Life is for me.

—Pier of Audacity

Perhaps calling asks us to trust what repeatedly brings us into greater aliveness and expression.

Perhaps recognising the image of our own life should make us more reverent toward the mystery of another’s. If no one else can completely know what something means within the image of my life, then I must grant you the same freedom.

I can offer you my experience. I can tell you what I know. I can love you enough to warn you when I see danger.

But I cannot tell you what your life is here to become.

That recognition belongs to you.

Perhaps something of this was already revealing itself when I wrote:

That we might realise the Life we’ve been seeking
That we might know ourselves and be known.

—Returning with Gifts

And perhaps this is what a life asks of us: to become intimate enough with its image to recognise it, and faithful enough to let it take form.

What is deepest in us keeps seeking a way to be lived.

Our task is to answer it with our life.