WAY WILL OPEN
By the time I began my sabbatical at Pendle Hill-the year
that stretched into a decade-I had been in Washington, D.C.,
for five years, growing more fearful every clay that I was
living a life not my own. I was thirty-five years old and had
a Ph.D. and decent references, so finding a new job would
have been no great problem, not in that place and time. But
I wanted more than a job. I wanted deeper congruence
between my inner and outer life.
I had worked in Washington as both a community
organizer and a professor, an activist and an intellectual-
without feeling at home in either of those worlds. If you buy
the scurrilous notion that "those who can, do, and those who
can't, teach" (which I may have half-believed at the time,
mired as I was in a slough of despond) you will understand
why it felt like I had exhausted all possible vocations!