Why I don't like the phrase "find your purpose."

“Find your purpose” is a phrase I’ve never been too fond of.

It’s used to market to people’s pain points.  I would know.  I spent most of my early adulthood feeling like a an unmoored misfit, trying to make it in a music career, but feeling like (gasp) music wasn’t quite enough.  Don’t get me wrong, I breathe music.  I adored it as still do.  But, I didn’t know how to reconcile my love of music and performing, with the feelings of “what am I supposed to do with my life?”

Bees changed that of course, but that’s another story.  Now, almost a decade into this bee-centric career, I get asked a lot, why bees.

Let me tell you: bees are not my purpose.  Bees are the vehicle that powers my soul’s drive.

I’ve worked with marketing teams before, and they always ask me to “find your ideal client’s pain point.”  They want to know the “results” working with me will drive.  They get really excited if they can throw in the mouth-watering hook “find your purpose.”

But what if looking for purpose isn’t the point?  There are many direction I could have gone with my life.  It could have been music.  Or folklore.  Or therapy.  Or travel agent.  It needed up being bees, for now.  But it’s not just bees is it?  It’s bees, folklore, travel, dreams, women’s wisdom, shamanism, animism, eco-literacy, mythology, and spiritual ecology.

What if, it’s not so much a question of finding your purpose, but rather, asking what drive you.  What propels you forward in this one wild life?

It a way it’s the same question, but rather than finding a catch phrase or a job, you’re asking yourself what moves you to act, create, live.

For me, it’s a love of the animate earth.  Beyond that, it’s a drive to help people fall in love with the Earth.  You could fall in love through gardening, hiking, clouds, rocks, bats, phosphorescent seas.  You name it.  It was bees for me, but the bees are the vehicle, not the purpose.

What drives me is a belief.  The belief that if we fall in love with the earth (any aspect of it), we are more likely to develop a relationship with it.  And in developing a relationship with it, we learn to listen to it.  In learning to hear the non-human world, to love it, to relate to it, we naturally want to support it.  Whether that support looks like climate action or helping kids identify weird cool bugs, it doesn’t matter.  What matters, is that you have more love in your life, and that love is reciprocal.   

I believe that the only way we turn the tide on this massive ship of the Anthropocene is through falling in love to the point of relating, and from that point, finding different ways of being with the earth.

What about you?  What drives you?  What calls your soul onward?  Forget a catchy, well-defined purpose.  What does your soul ache for?

Bone Memory

Aurora on Dartmoor. Devon, England.

There is old memory in all of us. Or perhaps what I mean, is there is human animal memory in all of us. Call it ancestral, call it instinctual, call it past life. It comes from the same place. Bone memory.

I witnessed this in my daughter when friend and author, Sylvia Linsteadt took her up to the ancient bone lands of Dartmoor, where the crone mother presides over bog and changeable mists. Where young foals and lambs test their new legs.
We could not hike far. It was more of a wee ramble over stone and grass, avoiding prickly gorse, and foot-snaring holes.
Sylvia recognized the cuckoo’s call fist. Unmistakable. Just like the famous clocks. Cuckoos are good luck. To hear the first cuckoo of spring is incredibly fortunate. Indeed, other hikers stopped to listen and look for this rare blessing.
Of course we left the songbird offerings. My 2 year old daughter, understanding the magic of the moment then requested that we all take hands and dance a little fairy jig in a ring. She doesn’t know about fairies, or dancing jigs, or May Day dances, or any of the customs of her heritage, but there she was, directing us in a little dance. When she was finished, she requested we lay down on three separate stones, and close our eyes.

If you know anything about fairy lore, hearing a magic bird, dancing on the moor, and falling asleep on a rock is most certainly the beginning of an otherworldly tale.

She knew. Bone memory knew that here, in this land, as the newly born foals wobbled near their mothers, here is where you dance. Here is where you lay your mortal body against the ancient stone. Here is where some part of you remembers: yes, this. I know this. I am this. This place is in me. I recognize this land, because I am eternal, and all my grandmothers are alive within me.