Stalking my calling

 

I was not stalking my calling, but hunting up a poem, when I stumbled across my copy of "Living like Weasels" from Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard. (I'm doing a brief reading at commencement in May, and was looking for my copy of this poem by astronomer Becky Elson, which I love, but is it too dark for commencement?)

If you haven't read it, it reads like a bloodthirsty take on Mary Oliver's poem The Summer Day. The one with the line about "your one wild and precious life." (And which I am definitely not reading at commencement.)

The whole weasel essay is a joy, science and language and imagery all tangled together like the wild roses and poison ivy around Hollins Pond. Or snapped into a single whole like Dillard's mind and the weasel's. 

She opens with the story of an eagle found with the dry skull of a weasel clamped onto its neck, driven by its predatory instincts to bite even as it became prey. To do as it must, to do as it was meant to do — bite — even in extremis.

Dillard closes the essay by mulling  about vocation. "We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — even of silence — by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse...I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you...Seize it and let it seize you up aloft..." 

In these last few weeks of teaching I seem to be stalking my calling again, looking for the tender spot, for the pulse point, and the willingness to seize it, letting it grasp me as I grasp it. To do — to be — as I was meant to be.