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Contemplating our calling as an acorn also proposes a different way of thinking about what it means to “grow” in our skills and power:

To be an adult is to be grown-up. Yet this is merely one way of speaking of maturity, and a heroic one at that. For even tomato plants and the tallest trees send down roots as they rise toward the light.

Hillman, The Soul’s Code, page 41

That is, we grow not only up—not only skyward—but down, into the roots, back to that from which we came and to which we will, one day, return. We become, in time, more rooted and resilient, more capable of surviving the storm, less easily shaken away from ourselves by idle wind or rain. When I think about growing down instead of up, I think about becoming centered, about knowing what work is ours to do (and, critically, what work is not), about a slow, steady power rather than a rash and inconstant one. After all, as anyone who’s ever lived among city trees can tell you, neither brick nor concrete nor iron can stop a root as it seeks out water. We should be as steady in our search for that which nurtures our own lives.

Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman posits that we are each accompanied by what the Romans called our genius, what Plato referred to as our daimon, and what Hillman variously calls the “acorn,” “guide,” or “angel”—that mystical being who both protects us and insists on driving us toward our soul’s calling. As cosmology, I’m not keen on this theory. But as an alternative to other modern myths—that our lives are determined by our parent’s failings, our childhood traumas, our chromosomes and DNA—I think it warrants attention. For my own purposes, I take Hillman’s theory to mean that we are, each of us, unique and uniquely driven to some calling, and that to heed that calling—whether or not we fully understand it, whether or not it accords with the present and unjust strictures of the society we inherited, whether or not it’s practical or reasonable—is to move toward our own liberation.