It doesn’t interest me what do you do for a living. I want to know what you care 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 square to 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 tip of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to 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 in order to be true to yourself. And if you compare 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’s 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 on 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 a night of grief and despair, broken 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 would stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back. It doesn’t interest me where or what or within whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments…
The invitation is a declaration of intent, a map into the longing of the soul, the desire to live passionately, face-to-face with ourselves and skin to skin with the world around us, and to settle for nothing less than what is real. I want to live with deep intimacy every day of my life. I am guided, sometimes driven, by the 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 know the exquisite beauty and the bone wrenching sorrow of being fully alive. Knowing how frightening both the beauty and the pain can be, I offer to you at the beginning of your journey three promises and three warnings. I want to know if you really can get up with nothing in you wants to do anything but stay beneath the covers. I want to know if you can do the small, mundane but necessary tasks, if you can give what is needed when you feel you have nothing left to give. Can you be alone with yourself? I’m not asking if the idea of being alone appeals to you but if you can actually be present with yourself, for longer than a couple of hours, without flipping on the TV or radio or picking up the telephone or magazine, or if you can truly find and be peace peace with your own company. Are you just reading about the ache, the sorrow, the joy, courage, the peace or are you truly living it. Can you truly be present with your joy and your sorrow, your longing and your desires, layer upon layer of our lives and the world are revealed. We cannot tell in advance which aspects of our carefully constructed sense of self, if any, will survive. No part of the journey is wasted once you recognise within yourself a hunger for something beyond just continuing, once you taste even the possibility of touching the meaning in folded in your life, you can never be completely content with just going through the motions. There is no going back. Learning cannot be undone. the wisdom touched in moments of real intimacy, penetrates the soul with knowledge of who and what we are it transforms us opening ourselves to living intimately with the world is not selective process. The journey will not be easy if we refuse to touch the places of sorrow or confusion with ourselves or others, we cannot cultivate the ability to be completely present in our moments of joy and ecstasy. we must be open to sorrow as well as Joy and expand our ability to hold ourselves and the world in our own hearts. It is possible to fill pain without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it, to dance with joy and feel ecstasy completely, to live with failure, to see beauty, to stand in the centre of the fire. And live it without regret and birth within you the infinite tenderness for the courage of the human heart, that will stand up again and again and expand to hold all that matters, even when doing so seems, to the human mind, unbearable or simply impossible. When we pay attention to each moment and do not shrink away from what is true we experience a presence that is not as alone, it holds the presence of a great mystery, known by so many different names, God spirit a great mother and it lifts us fills us with a silence and a sharp taste of the interconnectedness of all life. And this great mysteries sustains us.
From The Invitation by Oriah
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