Who are you really?

—The editors

The first whisper of my life’s calling came as a fascination for all things old and mysterious. A dreamy child, I was pulled to the stars in the night sky and to tumbledown buildings; to fairy tales, ghosts, and the Latin chanting during Sunday Mass. Around the age of 10, I interpreted these vague stirrings to mean that my mission in life was to solve mysteries, and I ordered a "professional detective" set out of the back of a magazine. When I unwrapped the package to find a cheap set of handcuffs and a cracked toy magnifying glass, I suffered the first of many disillusionments on the road to finding my calling.

I set my sights next on becoming an archaeologist. Then came my "first woman" dreams—the first woman president, the first woman on the moon. Instead, caught up in the heady uprush of the ’60s counterculture, I became the first hippie in my corner of Missouri and wrote a column lyrically titled "Wildflowers" for the high school newspaper. In it, I set the small conservative town I lived in on its ear by asking people to consider the possibility that they might have encountered Jesus in a past lifetime. The surprisingly thoughtful responses I received initiated me into the magic of ideas and words to convey fresh perspectives on life. And in some form or another, I’ve been doing the same thing ever since.

While this path seems so clear in retrospect, my life has many times felt like a chaotic jumble of interests tugging in wildly divergent directions. Meditation teacher, clothing designer, historical novelist, astrologer: I’ve worked at them all over the years. But somewhere along the way, a subtle but uncompromising force pared away the things I was not meant to do and held me to the tasks I seemed, in the end, to do best. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it my "calling." I’m here in this world, I’ve finally realized, to discuss and write about what first lifted my gaze to the night sky as a child—the deeper, mythic side of life. This discovery feels less like evolving into someone new than like returning to who I always was in the first place. "You never lose the image in which your soul is shaped," writes Jungian psychologist James Hillman in The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (Random House, 1996). "Everyone is marked; each of us is singular."