ABSTRACT
Reading “My Name,” a poem by Mark Strand (2005), reminded me of a similar experience I had when I was struggling with vocational questions in my early twenties. Strand lyrically captures the astonishment when, within the natural and familiar world that seems to be running along steadily on a continuous track of time and space, one receives a most personally addressed “signal of transcendence”:
One night when the lawn was a golden green and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered what I would become – and where I would find myself – and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard my name as if for the first time, heard it the way one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off as though it belonged not to me but to the silence from which it had come and to which it would go.
