The Soul Call

Zoe Darlington by the water at golden hour

This is a longer one. Grab a cup of tea, sit down if you can. It's a raw piece, coming straight from my soul. I hope it's worth the time.

Last Sunday was the solstice, a turning point of the year. I spent some time over the weekend reflecting on what that turning point asked of me.

Every solstice and equinox, I do the same thing: I take a deliberate pause. Not a break from life, a pause into it. A moment to step back from the doing and ask what's actually driving me underneath it all.

I use the pagan and Celtic natural calendar as my anchor, my guide. I believe in honouring the seasons and the cycles. That's our connection. You see it in nature, all life is connected. How do animals know when to migrate, when to nest, when to hibernate? It's not on a to-do list. It's in their innate nature. Somewhere along the way, humans got disconnected from nature, from their own nature. We are nature, just like the birds, the fish, the trees.

In that connection, we find this deep call from within. I call it the soul call.

Recognising it

The soul call doesn't shout. It whispers, and it's always whispering, the same thing, time and time again and it never changes.

The noise in your head is a different thing entirely. That can be loud, chaotic, often rooted in fear, often reactive. It's easy to mistake that noise for the truth, because it's the loudest voice in the room. But underneath it, the soul call just keeps whispering, patient, unbothered by how busy or chaotic everything else gets.

We often ignore it, especially when our life isn't aligned to it. Because then, listening feels like such a huge stretch, such a big jump to even consider. I've been there and I know how distant it can feel.

But if you don't listen, you lose something. You leave something behind. I believe that voice means something. I believe each and every one of us is here for a purpose, and I don't want to waste this life silencing that light just to conform anymore.

If we do, it chips away at you. I felt asleep for most of my adult life. Going through the motions, never quite happy, never satisfied. My head kept telling me I just needed the next promotion, the pay rise, the new car, the five-star holiday, the bigger house, designer clothes.

When you really think about it, consumerism and addiction live off the same thing: a deep, root dissatisfaction. We're always trying to fill that void. But no amount of anything material, and no amount of substance, will ever fill it, I know, I've tried.

As a child, I was the girl who rescued animals. I once found a blackbird in the road, badly hurt, a cat had got to it, and I nursed it back to health. That blackbird could never fly high again, it could only get a metre or so off the ground, but it spent years and years in our garden. It reared its own chicks there. We had a dog, so it was safe from cats. It even learned to mimic the sound of a blackbird's call.

I was the kind of kid who got upset about pollution. An environmentalist. A vegetarian, I went on animal rights protests, took petitions into school. I wanted to be a fashion designer, I made my own clothes.

I was also good at science and maths. Top set, 99% on a maths exam one year, told I could possibly sit my exams early. The career days the school set up were all about becoming a scientist, working for one of the big local pharma companies, or ICI. It was a path that never lit me up inside. It filled me with dread, that wasn’t who I wanted to be.

I liked magic, moonstones, crystals, even then. I used to spend hours with my great-nan, who made her own remedies, read tea leaves, and was clairvoyant.

I was being pushed down a route that didn't feel like me.

I'm from a working-class Northern family. My dad was an electrician, my mum worked in a crisp factory, packing crisps. The message was absolutely certain: you needed a proper skill, a proper job, an apprenticeship. People like us didn't become activists or fashion designers. That wasn't a real job. My relationship with my father wasn't always an easy one. That message came with weight behind it.

So I rebelled. By 20, I'd partied hard, taken copious amounts of drugs, drunk far too much. Looking back now, I understand it differently. The feeling underneath it all was real, and it was right: something isn't right, something needs to shift, something needs to change. That was the soul call, working exactly as it should, working its way through me.

But I had no conditioning, no confidence, no know-how to act on what it was actually calling me toward. What it wanted was so far outside everything I'd been taught was acceptable. So the feeling found the nearest channel that was actually available to me, and partying happened to be a socially rewarded one. Go to the pub, get drunk, be the life and soul of it, and people love you for it. It felt like rebellion, but really it was the soul call, real and correct, just pointed at the only outlet I had any confidence to reach for.

Coming down at 20, I felt like a complete failure. My family were disappointed. So I decided to settle down. I got married. I got an engineering qualification, bought a house, then a bigger house, bought a Mercedes, built a career. Career-focused and materialist through my twenties, I desperately needed to prove to everyone I wasn't a failure.

I didn't realise it at the time, but I'd left my dreams, and my soul call, so far away. I'd committed to living a life for other people's approval. By then I couldn't get through an evening without a bottle of wine, a bottle and a half at weekends, just to drown it out.

I was with my husband for twenty-three years. He was similar to my dad in many ways: get a good job, earn good money, that was the attitude. I'd gone along with the version of life he wanted, the way I'd gone along with the version everyone wanted, for over two decades.

In my thirties, we had children, and something deep, innate, wild, woke up inside me. Carrying them, becoming a mother, breastfeeding, it stirred an instinct that had been there all along, nature's instinct, returning to me. I gave up alcohol through the pregnancies and breastfed for four years solid, and without the numbing, I could finally hear it properly. The true me, surfacing again, whether I was ready or not.

After breastfeeding ended, the drinking crept back in. A bottle of wine once the children were down for the night, back to old ways a little. The unhappiness was building underneath it, and I knew it wasn't really about him. It went further back than that.

I'd shut my soul call down early, in my early twenties, out of shame, out of feeling unworthy. My ex got a version of me that was already trying to bury that part of myself. The authentic me, the one underneath, he never wanted. I don't think that was his fault, though. I'd buried that part of myself years before he even came into the picture. He used to call it being rebellious. "When are you ever going to stop being rebellious?" he'd say. That side of me was never what he wanted, and I'd always moulded myself into what was wanted instead. I wasn't always completely authentic with him, because I wasn't sure I was being completely authentic with myself.

It came to a head during COVID lockdown. The drinking had gotten stronger through it, and being stuck in the same house every single day, with him, no escape, no distraction, made the unhappiness impossible to keep ignoring. A few months in, I made myself a rule: before I made any major decision, I had to give up alcohol first. I needed a clear head, not a hungover one, to know if what I was feeling was real.

So I stopped drinking. Six months, that first time. And somewhere in that sobriety, with a clear head at last, I decided to leave my husband.

It took me years to actually get there, the unhappiness, the shame I'd buried since my twenties, none of that resolved overnight. But the decision itself, once my head was clear enough to trust it, was simple: I wasn't looking for anyone else. I needed to find myself, and I didn't believe I could do that inside that relationship.

Deep down, I think I knew quite early on that I didn't really want to be with him either. He was conventional, sensible, steady, everything I felt I wasn't. And I think, looking back, that was exactly why I chose him. I didn't trust myself. I felt flawed, so I went looking for someone conventional, as if that could balance out whatever I thought was wrong with me.

Deep down, I always feared I couldn't cope on my own. That fear had kept me there longer than the marriage itself ever could have.

There's something else, too. Neither of us was fully aware of it at the time, but I think I fell into a familiar pattern, one I recognised much later as similar to growing up with my dad. When things didn't go a certain way, the atmosphere would shift, and it always felt easier, simpler, to just go along with things rather than push back.

They were little things, mostly. Nothing dramatic, just small accumulations. But that's actually the interesting part, isn't it. It's rarely the big decisions that take your life off course. It's the hundreds of tiny ones, each one small enough to seem reasonable on its own. It's the same logic as Kaizen, continuous improvement, except running in reverse: small incremental steps in the wrong direction, compounding, until one day you look around and think, how did I end up here? This isn't where I wanted to be. When did I even choose this?

You don't see it happening while it's happening. You only see it once you've arrived somewhere you never meant to go.

That's why I trust this so much now: if every small decision, every little action, carries your values and your purpose inside it, even when it seems like nothing, even if it's just a quiet awareness in the background, it becomes your compass. Not something you have to consciously steer by every time. Just there, constantly correcting, keeping you moving in the right direction. That's so important. It's the whole difference between drifting somewhere you never chose, and staying yourself, little step by little step.

You see the same pattern at a much bigger scale, too. No corporation ever sat down and decided to destroy a rainforest or heat up the planet. It was thousands of small decisions, each one defensible on its own, none of them rooted in values that valued life, just compounding, quietly, toward something nobody explicitly chose. Same mechanism, different scale. Set the compass toward your values and your purpose, your soul call, and the little steps build something beautiful. Leave it pointed at something else, even unintentionally, and they build something else entirely.

I walked away anyway.

My soul call had become so strong I could no longer deny it. Anything that wasn't aligned to it became a physical aversion, something in me would recoil. But I'd spent a whole life wearing a mask, avoiding it. So the real question became: how do I actually live aligned with my soul? That was the journey, and it wasn't easy.

It's why, above anything else, I have so much respect for people who find their soul call, or who've lived their whole lives values-led and soul-led. I've always been in awe of them. They've always shown me my golden shadow, that quiet thing I admire in them, reflecting back exactly what I haven't yet let myself fully become.

Connecting to it

Once I'd decided, I needed somewhere to actually process it all. So I'd go out into nature on my own. I'd go by the river.

Staying sober helped me stay clear through everything that followed. Not drinking quietened the noise, the fear, the anxiety. I started getting natural highs back. And I realised how much alcohol had been numbing all along, which is probably why I'd used it for so long, but it numbed everything, even my connection to soul and source. It kept me low and slightly sedated.

As I stayed sober and connected more with nature, my innate self kept coming to the surface. I discovered meditation eventually, after leaving my husband. I went out and bought camping kit, and in that first year I camped around twenty times, many of those trips solo, in remote locations.

In nature, by yourself, you really do get to know yourself. I'd recommend that to anyone.

I spent time by that river through my hardest times, and I felt something there, a kind of divine connection, long before I had any name for it. It was only later that I learned about Hafren, the legendary goddess of the Severn. Discovering she existed didn't create that connection, it had already been there, but it deepened it. Gave it a name, a story, a lineage. I felt even stronger tied to her, and to the river, after that.

But connecting wasn't only solo, even if that's where it started. There's something I've come to really believe: you become the people you spend the most time with. Some people give you energy, some people take it, and you need to be careful, really careful, about where you're giving yours.

It was only once I'd broken away and started to find myself that I was pulled toward any of that. I spent a lot of time solo first, the camping trips, the river, the nature. That came first, and it had to. Then, when I felt ready to re-emerge into the world a little more, I was very conscious about who I spent my time with, and what I spent it doing. I sought it out deliberately: healing retreats, meditation groups, sound baths, alternative therapies. That's where I found my own people. New friendships, built around the same things my soul was calling me toward, not around who I'd always been expected to be. They fill me with light and energy now. I love that.

That circle matters as much as the solo river time does. Being around the wrong people will drain you dry, however quietly. Being around the right ones will strengthen you in ways nothing else quite can. You sometimes have to actively choose to find them, because they won't always already be in your life.

I journal. I have spiritual and meditation practices. Once I found that connection, there was no way I was ever going to let it go again. My rituals are processes, really, they enable my soul and my spiritual self to flow. I use visualisation, timelines, the same processes that feed business plans, just turned toward something deeper.

Underneath all of it is source. That quiet space you drop into when you properly meditate, when the noise finally settles and there's nothing left but stillness. I go there as often as I can. It's not somewhere you arrive once and stay. It's somewhere you return to, again and again, deliberately. That's connecting to it, really. Not a single moment of clarity, but a practice of going back to that quiet place, over and over, for as long as you live.

Here's the thing though: it's easy to lose. It's easy to fall back into old habits, easy to listen to the noise again, the fear, the conditioning. It's a habit of a lifetime, that conditioning, and undoing it doesn't happen once and stay done. Strong practices and processes are what keep me flowing. I love these practices. They're acts of self-love and self-care.

These days, the turning points of the year are my checkpoint, my deliberate data pause. The river is still where I go. I sit with it. I connect to source. I let the inner core get clear again, not rushed, not forced, just clear.

This is the first part of the programme I take every Pure Collective client through, before any system, before any process, before any strategy: the soul call. Recognised. Connected to.

This is ultimately why I set up Pure Collective, and why Pure Retreats is coming too. Because it was never just about the programme. It's the community. It's the people. It's the circle. That real connection, to nature, and to the right people, the ones who lift you, who get you, who are simply there. I want to bring people that.

And I'll be honest, there's a selfish part of this too. I want to work with beautiful, soul-led, values-driven people. I want to support them, yes, but I also just want to be around them. They lift me too. They inspire me. Building this isn't only for them, it's for the circle I want to belong to as well. (More on Soul, Systems, Flow in my post "Soul, Systems, Flow," if you want the fuller shape of how it all fits together.)

When your soul drives your systems, your business will flow. But it's not just your business. It's your life.

If you'd like the template I use to map mine, comment below or send me a DM.