The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer (poem & book excerpts)
The Invitation
by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes.'
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
I think this poem was given to me by Toben, my second husband and still a very dear friend. I’m grateful for his presence in my life. I generally love this poem, obviously because so much resonates deeply and I’ve learned my way into some of it that it’s helped me name. For instance, I like the company I keep in the empty moments. The Invitation was first published as a prose poem in the journal New Age Journal in 1995. Oriah (born Oriah House, 1954, Canadian) wrote it in a single sitting after a frustrating cocktail party encounter, working out what she actually wanted to know about the people she met. I think what made it so very viral was that it so well named the sense of longing that happens when one wants actual encounter. (Also according to David, this was influenced by his poem “Self Portrait” which preceded it.)
I’m going to follow this with the excerpt from her book, “The Invitation” which I have loved her languaging of many things dear to me, all the things that one has to reconcile to live, the value of a life that orients to fullness and intimacy…
Excerpts from “The Invitation”
by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
This is the reality we live: aspiring to be our best, longing for and sometimes finding meaning and connection within ourselves and that which is larger than ourselves, we are undone by messy bathrooms, traffic jams, and burnt toast. I am not interested in a spirituality that cannot encompass my humanness… Beneath the small daily trials are harder paradoxes, things that the mind cannot reconcile but the heart must hold if we are to live fully: profound tiredness and radical hope; shattered beliefs and relentless faith; the seemingly contradictory longings for personal freedom and a deep commitment to others, for solitude and intimacy, for the ability to simply be with the world and the need to change what we know is not right about how we are living.
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Life lived intimately may not be easier. But it is fuller, richer, and more open to everything: the confusion and the insight, the excitement and the boredom, the shadow and the light. And somehow, expanding my ability to simply be with it all does make what is hard easier to bear, allows me to give and receive more in each moment. More often than not it simply helps me find my sense of humor when I’m taking myself too seriously, to laugh at how easily the wonderful serenity of the meditative moment can be shattered by the mundane sensation of cold water soaking my socks.
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All the while, deep inside, I know what I have always known: that the knowledge will never be enough… Wisdom is often born in the shadows, frequently more visible in the darkness than the light. The stadium lights of knowledge that seek to eliminate natural cycles of night and day, death and rebirth, sorrow and joy do not cast shadows—they provide only the steady glare of illumination. We must move into darker places if we are to find the wisdom we so desperately need. We rarely go there willingly, though every life contains its own cycles of grief and celebration. To meet wisdom in these dark places we must be willing and able to hold all of what life gives us, to exclude nothing of ourselves or the world, to tell ourselves the truth. Wisdom will stretch us far beyond where we thought we could or wanted to go. She will show us what we cannot change or control, reveal what is hard to know about ourselves and the world, and tear at the illusions of what we think we know, until we are surrounded by the vastness of the mystery. And all the while, wisdom asks us to choose life. She does not want us to just continue, to hang on, to survive. She asks us to experience life actively, fully, every day—to show up for it all.
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To find those places, inside ourselves and in the world, where we belong, to find that for which we were made and to recognize it — this is joy. I was made to dance around the dining-room table…I belong to the stars in the night sky and on the mirrored surface of the lake — to the silence of the wilderness in darkness. I was made to ride the dragon. I belong to the ideas I love. I was made to study and learn and teach and write. I belong to all of this and much more — this is my joy. And it is limitless.
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I want to live with deep intimacy every day of my life. I am guided, sometimes driven, by an ache to take the necessary risks that will let me live close to what is within and around me. And I am sometimes afraid that it will be too much, that I will not have, or be connected to, whatever it takes to be with it all, to bear the exquisite beauty and bone-wrenching sorrow of being fully alive…
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In a culture that values individual freedom over all else, this is what we too often have lost, what we must remember if we are to do what has to be done for the future of our people without sacrificing our souls: how to surrender to doing what needs to be done to feed the minds and bodies and hearts of our children. And who are not our children? When we surrender, when we do not fight with life when she calls upon us, we are lifted, and the strength to do what needs to be done finds us. It is easy to forget this, especially when we are weary and bruised through the center of our being by life’s disappointments, by illness or poverty or grief. And it is there, in that moment when it seems impossible, when we think we have nothing more to draw upon, that something else can enter, if we surrender to the tasks life demands of us. In this place, there is no more trying. There is only being and doing what needs to be done. We are “at cause” because we have remembered that we can choose to serve only the cause that matters: life herself. And in our capacity to do this willingly, when we get up anyway and do what needs to be done for love, we shine with dignity. When I see this in another I am filled with infinite tenderness for our fragility and our strength.
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Tell me, can you love life and let love find you when you are lost? What sustains you, what helps you sit without hope and wait, opening your heart to love when you have no faith that love exists?
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And every time — every single time — love finds me, sometimes in the impossible relief of experiencing once again the deep knowing that I am held, sometimes in the shiver of sweet ecstasy as I unexpectedly kiss the face of the Mystery, and sometimes in the warmth of being touched deeply by the words and actions of the people who reach out for me. It may take a moment or what feels like forever, but I am found…
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The truth is, I only have to receive and give what I am able. There is no risk. The intimacy, the interconnectedness of all life that is the love to which we all belong, can only be given and received. It cannot be taken. And when it is given and received, we are sustained.
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Tell me, how do you live with yourself and those around you? Are you willing to meet yourself and not turn away from what you see? Can you touch skin-to-skin when we meet, with just a word, a gesture, a moment of shared silence? Can you find your way home again and again, to the place where all longing is met? In the moments when we have come home to ourselves and the world, there is no fear, because we know what we belong to and what belongs to us.
