Click on thumbnail images above to see fullsize cover

Read an excerpt from What We Ache For
Read an excerpt from Opening The Invitation
Read the background to The Invitation
Read an excerpt from The Invitation
Read the background to The Dance
Read the poem that opens The Dance
Read an excerpt from The Dance
Read an excerpt from The Call
Read the poem that opens The Call

From Chapter Four "Learning To See" in What We Ache For :

. . . In creative work we seek to add our consciousness to what the world offers to us in ways that create new stories, images, and sounds that reveal insights, patterns and truths we may not have seen before. But to do this we have to be able to get our conditioned responses- the belief, for instance, that water should necessarily be depicted in paintings as blue- out of the way so we can see the fullness of the world within and around us. This is harder to do than we might think. From our earliest childhood we have been taught to see in mutually agreed upon ways. When my eldest son, Brendan, was in junior kindergarten his teacher asked his father and I to come in for an interview to discuss Brendan's perfunctory participation in classroom art projects. Mystified, I packed up several pieces of artwork Brendan had done at home and went to the school. The teacher, clearly frustrated with Brendan, showed us picture after picture that he had drawn in school in response to directions she had given the class. When she'd asked the students to draw a picture of the place they lived he had drawn the outline of a black box with a red triangle on top. Beside the "house" was a green ball atop the brown stick of a tree trunk. A yellow ball in the upper corner was presumably the sun. All the pictures he had drawn at school had clearly been done quickly and without much thought or care. I spread out one of the pictures from home on the teacher's desk. Every inch of the paper to the edges and corners was crowded with images at different angles, in a multitude of colors and with little or no regard for the laws of gravity. There were kings with gold crowns at the top of the page and huge birds flying through the air beneath them surrounded by multicolored forests and strange animals and people engaged in different activities.

The teacher stared in disbelief at the contrast. "Well," she said at last, "clearly Brendan does not find my directions inspiring." I refrained from asking why she felt compelled to direct four year olds in creative expression. Was it important to evaluate them on their willingness to comply with another's way of seeing? Why not just turn them loose with paint and crayons and paper? She looked at Brendan's father and I with real concern. "Brendan," she stated emphatically, "is not going to do well in the public school system. He is not a team player. He does not care enough about what others think about what he does." His father and I, not as free of the desire to have others think well of us, suppressed our smiles.

She was right. Brendan did not do well in the public school system. Living by the rhythm of your own inner drummer, or by the map of your own creative imagination in whatever form that takes, holds its own challenges. But perhaps it is easier to deal with being out of step with the world around you than it is to find the creative impulse if you can only see the world in narrow preconceived ways. And external authority- the voice of the parent or teacher or media source that tells us how to see- is not the only or the most tenacious authority we have to shake off in order to see things in a variety of ways and let our imaginations respond unfettered. Recently, reading spiritual teacher Krishnamurti's admonishments not to surrender to the very normal human desire for certainty and security by acquiescing to any external authority's notion of how things are, I was feeling pretty self-congratulatory. Having been through the fire of studying with and then leaving a spiritual teacher, having reached the age of fifty and finding myself less inclined to court others' approval, I was feeling relatively free of the influence of external authority on my ability to see the world around me.

But as I read further I discovered Krishnamurti asking for something more, asking us to see what is without relying on the authority of our own experience. For the first time I considered how, despite my resistance to external authority, I often allow the authority of my experience- that which has come before- to shape and shade how and what I see in this moment, including how and what I remember of the past. Of course, experience can be useful. When I get in my car to drive on icy roads it's important to remember what I learned from last year's unexpected and abrupt trip into the roadside ditch. But when I am observing the world and myself, when I want to take in the raw material of creativity, my past experience conditions my mind and often dictates what I will see and how I will see it, narrowing the range of material to which I can bring my imagination in order to create stories or poems or images. Giving my experience authority over my seeing I do not expect to see beauty at the garbage dump, so may miss the way the piles of snow-filled tires make black and white patterns of light and shadow. My mind, conditioned by the authority of my experience of growing up in a small town does not expect to see a story in my weekly visit to the local post office, and so I may miss really seeing the woman who hands me stamps and parcels, may not even notice the exchange we have or consider the meaning I might have found in a story about our encounter.

One of the easiest and most enjoyable ways to become aware of your conditioned way of seeing, to open to new perceptions, is to spend time with people who see things differently than you do. Most of us spend time with people who share our worldview, people who think and see in similar ways. It gives us comfort to have the authority of our experience reinforced by another's experience. Being with those who have had different experiences and so see differently not only opens us to new perceptions but helps us become aware of our habitual blinders.

Years ago a talented and innovative composer came to study shamanic ceremonies with me. During one retreat I facilitated she took a tape recorder down into the gorge that ran through the property where we were staying and recorded the sound of the water rushing past the rocks and echoing off the cliffs on either side of the river. These sounds became the inspiration for and part of her later compositions involving electronic music combined with the sound of the human voice. Watching her work and learning to appreciate her music I started to listen differently, to move past expectations about what I would hear in different settings, to suspend instant judgments about what sounds were pleasant or musical, to perceive a much wider range of sounds. I began to notice relationships between sounds, began to imagine a layered wholeness in the sounds of our inner and outer worlds.

I am fortunate to live with someone whose ways of seeing are very different than my own. While this can sometimes lead to lively debate and points of contention it is also presents on-going opportunities to expand my own ways of seeing. My husband, Jeff, is a talented photographer. Often he takes pictures of things I don't even see: the rich colors and textures of peeling paint and rusting metal on a shed wall; the delicate lace of melting ice set against the dark wet wood of the back deck framed by sun-sculpted snow; shadows in doorways or windows that hint of other worlds. Also, where I am a mystic, Jeff is a scientist. I meditate, read poetry and study metaphysics; Jeff designs computer hardware, builds telescopes and is an avid astronomer. We have different areas of expertise but because the world is inherently inter-connected, when we can set aside our preconceived notions about both the world and our own abilities to comprehend what is unfamiliar, we offer each other new ways of seeing and imagining the world we share.

Recently, thinking about time, I asked Jeff to explain to me how atomic clocks work. After he explained cesium resonances to me we began to talk about the human preoccupation with measuring time precisely and the adjustments made to calendars over the centuries. Jeff told me about the advent of the Gregorian calendar in 1582. As the new calendar was instituted ten days had to be dropped in order to bring the dates into alignment with astronomical data. There was apparently considerable unrest about this at the time as the poor and uneducated feared the rich and powerful were trying to rob them of ten days of their lives. This got my imagination going: What if you really did have to wipe out ten days of your life? What ten days would you never be willing to surrender? What ten days would you be happy to miss? And what if a gap really did exist in time? What would happen to the continuity of cause and effect? What would happen to all the things that would have or could have happened in those ten days and the things they would have caused? Possible elements of science fiction and fantasy stories began to percolate in my imagination.

Sometimes it just takes a shift in perspective to help us see the world a little differently, to spark the imagination in new ways. Young children are particularly good at teaching us how to see past our conditioning, how to let what we are offered stir the imaginative mind. They simply don't have much experience. Everything is new to them. The stones in the driveway, the difference in the texture and taste of the round and the square sides of the crust on the bread, the way the cat washes herself- these are all fascinating when you are five and can lead to endless imaginative speculation. I remember preparing dinner one night when Brendan was about six years old. He was sitting at the kitchen table, silently and slowly opening and closing his mouth. I looked at him and raised my eyebrows in query. "If we could unhinge our jaw do you think we could fit a bowling ball into our mouths?" he asked thoughtfully. I just shook my head and laughed, delighted with the seemingly senseless but fascinating meandering of the imaginative mind.
Recently CBC radio reported that a western Canadian university decided to use the relatively unfettered perspective and imaginations of children to teach engineering students how to think more creatively. They paired engineering students with boys and girls in grade three, asking the eight year olds to imagine what kind of furniture they would like to have in their rooms. Then it was up to the budding engineers to find a way of making the furniture the children imagined. Apparently a hover-chair and a bunk bed on giant wheels were two of the projects that delighted both those who had conceived and those who had designed and built them.

We have to become aware of and set aside our conditioned ways of perceiving in order to hear the rising symphony in the rush of the river, to see the beauty in a bit of ice, to find the story beneath a series of events, to imagine hover-chairs and beds on wheels. As Mary Oliver reminds us in her poem "Wild Geese," wherever we are, our inner and outer worlds are constantly offering themselves to our imaginations. We often simply do not see what is right in front of us. We look for and see what we expect, what has been seen there before. The things that are most familiar, the world of our daily lives, the emotions and physical sensations that quickly come and go are hardly noticed or are labeled and judged in some habitual way that moves us past them with little or no real awareness. Our mind quickly labels what it perceives as good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, useful or useless and we move toward or away from what we see based on these often unconscious and automatic judgments.

Finding the stories we want to write, the play of light and shadow we want to photograph, the sounds we want to weave into songs in ways that are alive for ourselves and those to whom we will offer our work requires learning to see, to be aware, to pay attention. . . .

(go to top of page)

from Opening The Invitation

Some days things unfold in my life in a way that make me wonder why I am so certain that I need to diligently plan and work and try to make things come out right. Oh, I'm not suggesting that planning and working don't sometimes pay off, don't sometimes render hoped-for results. But when you follow the impulse that comes from a deep stillness without the smallest thought or a shadow of an expectation about the outcome and then watch as things effortlessly unfold in a way you would not even have dared imagine, it makes you question all this trying, this dark certainty that everything must be earned or fought for. It makes you consider grace and the blessings of a human life that are ours simply by virtue of being alive. It opens you to the possibility of real surprises. It reminds you of how limited our perspective is, of how we often can't even imagine what is possible as we take a deep breath and plunge into another day, throwing a load of laundry into the dryer and stacking dirty dishes in the sink as we rush to make the morning bus, juggling deadlines at work against parent-teacher interviews, cringing as we vow once again that this will be the last time we pick up fast food or order pizza for dinner.

But sometimes, unexpectedly, a quiet moment finds us and we drop down into the life we have beneath all the rushing and the trying and the endless daily details, sinking into the fertile soil of the sometimes neglected inner life, where the seeds of remembering what matters are planted. What comes from that place when we give it half a chance flowers in our lives and the world, creating unexpected changes in the direction of our journey and offering unanticipated blessings to us and those around us.

This is what writing "The Invitation" was like for me. It came in a quiet moment late at night when tiredness stopped my head from censoring the words that flowed from my heart onto the page. I had just returned from a party. I'm not good at parties. I always feel slightly confused standing around talking to strangers about things that don't really matter. I can't quite figure out what it is we're supposed to be doing. If we are celebrating something, someone's birthday or graduation or retirement, I want to do something together that will mark the occasion, have people offer prayers or stories or meditations that bring us into mindful awareness of the occasion and the person we are there to celebrate. And if we are just there to get to know each other, then I want to talk about things that matter, want to know how others feel about their daily lives, want to hear their hopes and disappointments, want to know what they think about just before they fall asleep at night, how they feel when their alarm clocks pull them up out of dreams in the morning. I'm not suggesting that my attitude toward parties is necessarily a good one. At times I wish I understood the purpose and practice of just hanging out with others, but the whole thing eludes me....

(go to top of page)

The Invitation

I wrote the prose poem, The Invitation one night after returning home from a party. I don’t usually attend parties but on this occasion, berating myself for being anti-social, I made an effort to go and be friendly. I returned home feeling frustrated, dissatisfied with the superficial level of the social interaction at the party. I longed for something else.

Years before I had attended a writing workshop where poet David Whyte had given us a writing exercise, based on a poem of his own, where we began alternate lines with the phrases, “It doesn’t interest me. . .” and “What I really want to know is. . .” Using this form I sat down and wrote The Invitation as an expression of all the things I really did want to know about and share with others. Several days later I included the poem in a newsletter I was sending to men and women who had come to do retreats and workshops with me. And from there, the poem took on a life of its own. People copied and shared it with friends and colleagues around the world, posting it on the internet, workplace bulletin boards and kitchen refrigerators. They read it at weddings and funerals, at conferences and gatherings in churches and boardrooms and universities. I began to hear from folks from all over the world-from Romania, Iceland, South Africa, New Zealand, Russia and from all over the United States and Canada. I couldn’t believe how many people felt touched by the longing for deeper intimacy expressed in the poem.

As the poem changed hands a few individuals took it upon themselves to add or change some words. “Faithless” was changed by some to “faithful,” “beauty” to “God” and-as I later found out-a man in Chicago, sure that I was an aged or deceased Native American man, put “Indian elder” after my name. Where possible I made requests for folks to share the poem as it was written and tried to correct the misrepresentation of myself as an “Indian elder.” Although there are stories of Native American ancestors in my family history (along with stories of German and Scottish descent) I am neither old enough nor wise enough to claim to be an elder of any people.

In 1998, after being approached by Joe Durepos, a literary agent seeking permission to use the poem in a book by Jean Houston, I began to write the book, The Invitation, using each stanza as a structure to go more deeply into each of the desires expressed in the poem and offering meditations I had used to explore my own longing. As I write in the beginning of the book 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.” It is the story of a very human woman who longs to live fully awake. It is the story of the human heart’s capacity and longing to live intimately with all of it-the joy and the sorrow, the hope and the fear.

The Invitation was published by Harper San Francisco in the spring of 1999. It became a best-seller and has been translated into over fifteen languages around the world.

(go to top of page)

from the chapter of The Invitation “The Commitment”

And then I did only what truly had to be done to feed the children. I made sure they were reasonably clean and dry and well fed. I listened to them and let them know they were loved. I stopped trying to find a place where there would be no tension between my desire to work in the world and my dedication to my children. I started to look for and find a way to simply live with this tension, holding it without struggle or hope of resolution.

In the ongoing sorting of what really did feed my children, I had to accept who I was. In some places I could and did stretch, but I also had to accept my limitations and not try to give my children something I simply did not have to give because I thought I should be able to. Sometimes they were the ones to teach me what I could and could not offer them.

When Nathan turned five, he had a birthday party—six small boys racing throughout the house at high speed and volume for four hours. I tried to be patient. I bought all the right things for the goodie bags, set up pin—the—tail—on—the—donkey, blew up balloons, and baked a cake. I wanted to be able to do it. And I hated it. Several days after the party, Nathan came and solicitously put his small hand on my arm as I sat at the kitchen table. “Mum,” he said, “you're not good at parties. I had a good time but I think from now on Dad should do the parties. He doesn't mind what boys do so much. It's okay. You're good at other things. But you're not good at parties.”

Nathan could see and accept who I was more easily than I could. And eventually, most days, I learned to accept that all that I can really offer my sons is who I am. I learned to stop trying to be someone else, to trust that what I could offer them would be enough, would feed them. So, I offered them the things I know and love: poetry, ideas, prayer, and time in the wilderness.

But the fact remains that there are things that children need, things that feed their bodies, hearts, and minds, that we may not feel up to providing some days. As creative as we can be about finding ways to provide these essential things while being all of who we are, there are some days when—we must simply draw on something deep within us and do what has to be done, even though we do not want to or think we can. I once had a teacher who was very keen on always being “at cause”-being the sole determiner of one's own actions—and never being “at the effect”-having one's actions directed or curtailed by circumstances or the needs and wants of others. The first time I met him I asked, in all innocence, “How can I be 'at cause' at three o'clock in the morning when one of my sons is ill and I have to get up and look after him?”

He had no answer for me and told me that this was why he disliked children so much—because they were so needy. It was looking after my sons that taught me the answer to my question. 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 the only 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 an infinite tenderness for our fragility and our strength.

I want to be with those who know of this, who have met within themselves the ability to feed the children when they thought they could not. These are the men and women who have, with great humility, tasted their own nobility.

© Oriah Mountain Dreamer, from the book The Invitation, HarperSanFrancisco, 1999

(go to top of page)

The Dance

Shortly after I finished the manuscipt for The Invitation, three things happened in my life: I discovered that the man with whom I had fallen in love and begun a relationship two months earlier was an alcoholic; I had a mild heart attack brought on by exhaustion; and I told my eldest son Brendan that he had to move out of my home. Having just passionately articulated my soul’s longing in The Invitation-the heartfelt desire to love myself, others and the world well-I was stunned and discouraged by how consistently I was failing to live this sincere intent.

So, in a somewhat desperate attempt to find the wisdom and knowledge to live consistent with my deepest desires, I began to write The Dance (Harper San Francisco, Fall 2001). Ready to face the truth about myself I plunged in, asking as I wrote, “Why am I so infrequently the person I really want to be?” I was willing to change, prepared to live in a different way in order to narrow the gap I feared was an abyss between my deepest intentions and my daily actions. I just wanted to know how.

The Dance is the story of how we can live soulfully on a daily basis. It is the story of my discovery that the question is not “Why are we so infrequently the people we want to be?” but rather “Why do we so infrequently want to be the people we really are?” It is the story of discovering why our quest for self-improvement does not lead to happiness or better lives or a more peaceful, just world. It is the story of finding who we really are, becoming all we are and knowing it is enough. It is the story of our struggles with those things that make it hard to remember who and what we really are, the places where is easy to become afraid-in our culture, the places where we deal with sex and death and money and power.

The stories, reflections and meditations in The Dance ask us to go further than we did in The Invitation-beyond the longing to the living, beneath the desire to the deeper ache and the knowledge that guides us in living true to what we are. It is the story of my human struggle to live with the shock of being awake, if only for intermittent moments, guided by the spirit of those wonderful lines by Rumi as translated by Coleman Barks:

There are lovers content with longing.
I’m not one of them.

(go to top of page)

The Dance

I have sent you my invitation,
the note inscribed on the palm of my hand by the fire of living.
Don’t jump up and shout, “Yes, this is what I want! Let’s do it!”
Just stand up quietly and dance with me.

Show me how you follow your deepest desires,
spiraling down into the ache within the ache,
and I will show you how I reach inward and open outward
to feel the kiss of the Mystery, sweet lips on my own, every day.

Don’t tell me you want to hold the whole world in your heart.
Show me how you turn away from making another wrong without abandoning yourself when you are hurt and afraid of being unloved.

Tell me a story of who you are,
and see who I am in the stories I live.
And together we will remember that each of us always has a choice.

Don’t tell me how wonderful things will be . . . some day.
Show me you can risk being completely at peace,
truly okay with the way things are right now in this moment,
and again in the next and the next and the next. . .

I have heard enough warrior stories of heroic daring.
Tell me how you crumble when you hit the wall,
the place you cannot go beyond by the strength of your own will.
What carries you to the other side of that wall, to the fragile beauty of your own humanness?

And after we have shown each other how we have set and kept the clear, healthy boundaries that help us live side by side with each other, let us risk remembering that we never stop silently loving
those we once loved out loud.

Take me to the places on the earth that teach you how to dance,
the places where you can risk letting the world break your heart.
And I will take you to the places where the earth beneath my feet and the stars overhead make my heart whole again and again.

Show me how you take care of business
without letting business determine who you are.
When the children are fed but still the voices within and around us shout that soul’s desires have too high a price,
let us remind each other that it is never about the money.

Show me how you offer to your people and the world
the stories and the songs
you want our children’s children to remember.
And I will show you how I struggle not to change the world,
but to love it.

Sit beside me in long moments of shared solitude,
knowing both our absolute aloneness and our undeniable belonging.
Dance with me in the silence and in the sound of small daily words,
holding neither against me at the end of the day.

And when the sound of all the declarations of our sincerest
intentions has died away on the wind,
dance with me in the infinite pause before the next great inhale
of the breath that is breathing us all into being,
not filling the emptiness from the outside or from within.

Don’t say, “Yes!”
Just take my hand and dance with me.

© Oriah Mountain Dreamer, from the book The Dance, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001

(go to top of page)

from the chapter of The Dance “Dancing with the Mystery”

This is my secret that all other truth telling seeks to disguise: I have always felt the presence of that which is larger than myself.

This is my earliest clear memory: I am lying in bed, curled into a tight ball, listening with every cell in my body. I'm cold, but it's fear and not a lack of heat that chills me. I must be three or four years old, old enough to be sleeping in a bed without railings, young enough to have been put to bed while there is still enough light coming in through the window to see the color of the pale pink walls of my room. I can hear my parents arguing in the next room. I cannot make out their words, but I recognize the sounds of anger and tears. The periodic silences are worse than the words—a separation that threatens the wholeness of my world.

Although they do not seem young to me, my parents are only in their early twenties. Later, as an adult, I will appreciate how they weathered the stresses and strains of being married and having two small children at such a young age. Later, after I have been twice married and divorced, I will wonder how they stayed together, I will marvel that there weren't more arguments, and I-will be grateful that there was no violence. Later, when I crawl into a dark corner beneath the desk in the apartment I share with my first husband, pulling my knees up under my chin and hoping to make myself so small he cannot pull me out and hit me again, I will think of my parents. And when my husband tries to convince me that all fledgling marriages are like ours, that behind closed doors all young couples are living with unhappiness and violence, I will almost believe him. Almost. What will save me is the memory of my parents who, even when they were young, argued without violence, laughed more than they cried, and played more than they fought.

But at three years of age, lying in the dark listening to the sound of their voices, I have no such perspective. I am simply frightened by the sound of their disagreement. I strain to hear their words, waiting for them to stop, willing them to turn toward each other. Gradually the anger in their voices is replaced with weariness and the silence is shared. Relieved but still worried, I cannot get to sleep. My body stays curled in a hard tight knot, and I can hear my own heart beating loudly. And so I pray to the God I've heard about in my Presbyterian Sunday school class. I ask him to keep us safe, to stop the fighting, to help me go to sleep. And as I pray, I begin to feel a presence with me in the room. it is a warm strength that surrounds my bed. My muscles relax into this presence that seems to hold me, and I imagine lying in a giant hand-the hand of God-there in my bed. And I fall asleep, held there by a great tenderness....

...To call this presence the Mystery is to be deliberately mindful that all the ideas-we have about this presence are simply that- our ideas. I do not know what it is; I only know from my experience that it is, even as I use my imagination as a key to open the door to this experience.
Every day, sometimes when I am doing my meditation practice and sometimes when I am working at my computer or sitting in my car waiting for a traffic light to change or sharing a meal with friends, I turn my attention to my breath and visualize myself on some inner plane of the imagination turning my face toward that which is larger than myself—the Great Mystery. I only have to turn my face toward it. I become aware of the temperature of the air touching my cheek. I imagine the molecules of oxygen and hydrogen and carbon dioxide colliding in exuberant activity, caressing the skin of my face. And I become aware that these molecules are alive with a vibration, a presence that is there also in the cells of my skin and in the molecules of those cells and in the atoms and subatomic particles of those.

Slowly I turn my attention to an inner view of the landscape around and within me, and I become aware of this presence, like the hum of a great song constantly reverberating throughout and emanating from my body, the chair supporting me, the ground beneath me, and the people around me. And I know this presence as a whole that is larger than the sum of the parts and yet inseparable from the parts—including me—which are in a state of constant change. And I experience this presence, this blood red thread of being that runs through the dark tapestry of daily life, as that which gives me the ability to truly know each other as another myself—as compassion. When I open myself fully to the awareness of this presence, my shoulders drop a little and my belly softens and releases the accumulated deposits of small daily worries that build up in my insides like mineral deposits from hard water springs. if I stay with my awareness of this presence, I know it as the heat at the center of life, as the innate orgiastic joy that shouts “Live!” even as it spends itself fully. I know it as the essence, the very stuff of which I, and everything that exists, am made, and I remember that this—this Mystery that is sacred—is who and what we are.

© Oriah Mountain Dreamer, from the book The Dance, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001

(go to top of page)

from the opening chapter in The Call

This is a story about surrendering from a woman who has found surrender impossible. This is a story about stopping the war, my war, the one I have fought all my life, the one I have not been able to give up despite the fact that I have lost every battle and sin cerely declared myself out of action over and over again. It's a story about stopping the war with what is within and around me because I have simply had enough of fighting, because I love my life and the world and have come to realize that in order to find the rest I ache for and the peace I want us to create together, I must give up the war I fight every time I allow my desire to create change, inner or outer, pull me into doing. Change will happen, change does happen, often as a result of our choices and our actions . But every time I let my actions be dictated solely or primarily by the desire to create change, every time I am attached to achieving a desired result, no matter how lofty or "spiritual" that hoped–for result may be, I am rejecting what is and so causing suffering in myself and in the world.

I thought that to heed the call, to know and embody the meaning of my life, I had to learn to do it differently. But what I had to learn, what I am still learning, was to stop doing altogether. I had to learn not-doing, something I had heard about years ago but dismissed as being at best an ideal beyond my humanness or at worst empty spiritual jargon. I remember the first time I heard a teacher, a Native American elder, tell a group of students that they had to learn the an of not-doing. I was a single mother with two small sons living on very little income, and I wondered just how not–doing would work when there are children to get up and dressed, breakfasts to prepare, lunches to pack, laundry to do, and a wage to be earned. I misunderstood. I assumed not-doing meant doing nothing–staring at a wall or sleeping–and there was precious little time for this in my life. Of course, even when we sit and stare at a wall or lie in bed sleeping we are usually doing something. We are thinking and feeling and sensing, if only in our dreams.

But not-doing does not depend on whether or not my body is moving or my mind is active. Not-doing is about letting any movement flow from an awareness of the deep and ever-present stillness that is what I am at the most essential level of being. It is here, in the awareness of my essential nature, that I find the meaning I seek in my life, not as an idea or an ideal but as an implicit knowing folded into my very being.

© Oriah Mountain Dreamer, from the book The Call, Harper Collins, 2003

(go to top of page)

The Call

I have heard it all my life,
A voice calling a name I recognized as my own.

Sometimes it comes as a soft-bellied whisper.
Sometimes it holds an edge of urgency.

But always it says: Wake up my love. You are walking asleep.
There's no safety in that!

Remember what you are and let this knowing
take you home to the Beloved with every breath.

Hold tenderly who you are and let a deeper knowing
colour the shape of your humanness.

There is no where to go. What you are looking for is right here.
Open the fist clenched in wanting and see what you already hold in your hand.

There is no waiting for something to happen,
no point in the future to get to.
All you have ever longed for is here in this moment, right now.

You are wearing yourself out with all this searching.
Come home and rest.

How much longer can you live like this?
Your hungry spirit is gaunt, your heart stumbles. All this trying.
Give it up!

Let yourself be one of the God-mad,
faithful only to the Beauty you are.

Let the Lover pull you to your feet and hold you close,
dancing even when fear urges you to sit this one out.

Remember- there is one word you are here to say with your whole being.
When it finds you, give your life to it. Don't be tight-lipped and stingy.

Spend yourself completely on the saying.
Be one word in this great love poem we are writing together.

© Oriah Mountain Dreamer, from the book The Call, Harper Collins, 2003

(go to top of page)

 

Site design by Peter Marmorek