In recent conversations I notice a theme: The challenge of finding language to re-write LinkedIn profiles, or redesign websites and CVs, after cycles of profound change.
Mainstream professional vocabulary can strangle rather than reveal depth, authority and graceful power. It can trivialise transitions that take place when we root in new ground and begin to work from it in ourselves.
Shaping words to weave an authentic relevant truth from journeys through messy, painful landscapes, through wastelands of grief and rage is an art. Equally so, finding vocabulary at the sweetly sharp edges of joy. Often poetry serves best but it’s tough to effectively use poetry in a LinkedIn profile or CV.
Lisa Gerrard, opera singer, received Golden Globe nominations for Insider and Ali, Oscar Nominations for Gladiator, and four International awards for Whale Rider, talks about singing “in the language of the Heart”. In an interview , she explains she invented language she started singing in aged 12 because “…The language is not corrupt, it is pure. You cannot lie, while you can lie in English.”
Words have a strange way of colluding with the causes of the unfolding crisis of these times. Their meanings have been corrupted over centuries in the context of political and economic campaigns. When we use them, we can find ourselves unwittingly complicit in dynamics that, at best, dilute the powerful grace of thresholds we cross when we emerge from needed and natural cycles of attrition.
An inevitable reckoning seems underway in both professional and personal worlds. The conditions for life require a reciprocal flow of both leaving and arriving. In our culture, only the arriving is welcomed, only the growing, the blooming, and in short, the growth.
What to say about who we are, what we do and why people should pay us to do what we do? As we begin to understand deep, true and disruptive truths, everything changes. We then stumble on words that represent incomplete truths like “productivity”, “achievement” and “sustainable growth”. As Lisa Gerrard said in her interview, you can lie in English. Greenwashing has been an example.
In my work, I’m finding there is hunger, a real and healthy appetite, along with increasing capacity, for “work that’s mine to do”. Faithfulness to this new territory is one aspect of the work of our times. “Spirit Work”, “Calling” or “Vocation” seem to arrive more as an instruction, from the place and time, the age and stage of each of our lives, often dawning slowly after loss. Many of us learned to override this sense early on. At what cost? Writer Nancy Charley speaks to this:
This woman
was a fertile field.
Yearly the farmer planted seed
and harvested good yield.
He cropped intensively,
applying fertilizer, pesticide
monitoring obsessively,
til she could not sustain
his expectation, could not nurture
another year’s grain.
A paltry harvest,
no rustling waves in summer breeze,
no golden gleam at sunset.
The farmer deserted,
left her stripped, whipped by storms.
She reverted
to squalid mire.
But nature heals. Grasses sprouted,
then meadow flowers
attracting bees and butterflies,
her hedgerow sheltering birds and mice.
A survivor, come back to life.
And those who chance upon her
stop,
gaze, restored to wonder.
In the coaching work I do, recognising this poem as an inner dynamic is a first step. A second is restoring (re-storying) impoverished mainstream language to enable us to talk about the power and grace of the fertile conditions of the Feminine (as a principle, not gender). What isn’t in the poem, and is a crucial part of the process, is the perspective of the farmer. That perhaps is for another time.
In the unravelling fabric of what has been “normal”, rich, deep meadows and hedgerows are hiding in plain view. As we revisit thresholds we’ve failed to honour in the past, a re-storing of language becomes possible. We water and care for this territory in each other in simple ways, with heartfelt words.
