For the past three years at Valpo, I’ve taken countless career tests, talked with mentors, and taken courses trying to figure out a career path. Finding my life’s purpose and calling has become almost an obsessive endeavor for my perfectionist mind. Being at the Guild has reminded me how important it is to embrace flexibility and trust the process. Over the past few weeks, several of our guests and resident artists have voiced a desire to welcome more “playfulness” into their work, letting go of the urge to over-direct it. As a result of this undertaking, I’ve found the common experience is learning and contentment.

I’ve come across this theme of flexibility and open-mindedness in my conversations with mentors and coworkers here at the Guild as well. A particular talk with one of our Spiritual Directors really resonated with me. She shared the idea that a calling is less about what you do and more about the spirit you bring to your work. In other words, any work can be purposeful if it’s approached with integrity and intention. That perspective felt incredibly freeing for me—it suggests that a calling might not be a single, fixed path, but something that can evolve as you do. The key is being willing to surrender control and create space for growth and discovery.

As I contemplated the implications of this for my life, Hilal Isler’s metaphor for Baldwin’s sense of belonging came to mind. She recognizes “those of us who move between nations, between homes. Those of us who grow identities, like skins, only to shed them, expand into new ones. Those of us who carry our sense of belonging like belongings, turtles and shells” (Isler 2019). Amid change and uncertainty, I’m learning that clarity isn’t always immediate but the journey can reveal what I couldn’t have planned for and teach me as I go. There may be rocks in the river, but the experience is shaped by how I move through it. Maybe, for now, that’s my calling: to be the turtle in the rocky river of life, going wherever the flow takes me.

My gratitude increases as I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass because her thoughts lead me to find awe in the intricacies of the natural world. In this book, Kimmerer weaves Indigenous wisdom with scientific knowledge through her gift of storytelling, and proposes an alternate way to be in relationship with the earth. Her chapter “The Gift of Strawberries” has especially attuned me to notice the gifts and abundance around me. Through the poetic nature of her writing, Kimmerer draws on wild strawberries to describe the workings of a gift economy. She highlights how a gift creates an ongoing relationship between the giver and the receiver, and further, she articulates how the more something is shared, the greater its value becomes. In our economy of commodities, relationships are transactional, and positioned toward taking what one deserves. In a gift economy, action is based in the recognition of enoughness, and in abundance.

Looking at our world, I find it easy to see where economies of commodities rule relationships between people, objects, and our natural world. Instead of recognizing where there is abundance, I see systems of scarcity that grab hold of people and how they live. I see this economy of commodities run through what belongs to us, or what we think we deserve. I see it in the threats, cuts, and fears that tear apart relationships and build distrust. It is important to notice these spaces, to grieve where grief is necessary, to take action where action is needed. But also, I’m learning that recognizing the gifts and abundance is necessary to challenge this mindset of scarcity and fear. Kimmerer described a process of giving, receiving, reciprocating, that is essential to cultivating relationships and finding the enoughness through gifts.

As I think through calling and purpose, I have often circled back to themes of stewardship this summer. The more I notice the giving, receiving, and reciprocating in a gift economy, the more I see the call to steward these gifts. If gifts are a form of building relationships, there is a responsibility we are called to through stewardship. When stewardship is out of mind, gifts become fought for resources that promote mindsets of scarcity. But when we steward what we have been given, there is a deeper understanding of enoughness in the abundance for everyone to participate in the gift.

I’m grateful for my fellow staff members, housemates, friends, and this corner of Indiana as a whole for all the gifts that have been given so abundantly to me, and to each of us. May we be stewards of all this, the gifts we have been given.