Let Your Life Speak
by Parker J. Palmer
Chapter II
"Now I Become Myself"
Copyright ©2000 by Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers
San Francisco, CA

pretend that you are not. You and I may not know, but we can
at least imagine, how tempting it would be to mask one's truth
in situations of this sort -- because the system threatens pun-
ishment if one does not.

But in spite of that threat, or because of it, the people who
plant the seeds of movements make a critical decision: they
decide to live "divided no more." They decide no longer to act
on the outside in a way that contradicts some truth about them-
selves that they hold deeply on the inside. They decide to claim
authentic selfhood and act it out -- and their decisions ripple
out to transform the society in which they live, serving the self-
hood of millions of others.

I call this the "Rosa Parks decision" because that remark-
able woman is so emblematic of what the undivided life
can mean. Most of us know her story, the story of an African
American woman who, at the time she made her decision, was
a seamstress in her early forties. On December 1, 1955, in
Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks did something she was not
supposed to do: she sat down at the front of a bus in one of the
seats reserved for whites -- a dangerous, daring, and provoca-
tive act in a racist society.

Legend has it that years later a graduate student came to
Rosa Parks and asked, "Why did you sit down at the front of the
bus that day?" Rosa Parks did not say that she sat down to
launch a movement, because her motives were more elemen-
tal than that. She said, "I sat down because I was tired." But she
did not mean that her feet were tired. She meant that her soul

LET YOUR LIFE SPEAK

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