The Invitation

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In The Invitation, visionary writer and teacher Oriah Mountain Dreamer wrote about what we long for. In The Dance, her second book, she explored how to live this longing. Now, in The Call, she shares with us her struggle with and discovery of “why”—why we are here and why we must each undertake the journey from longing to living fully and deeply in the world. This is my earliest clear memory: I am lying in bed, curled into a tight ball, listening with every cell in my body... More from the opening chapter in The Call The fourth stanza makes a clear statement about how she would like her lover to deal with life, specifically pain. She states that she needs to know if the listener has the strength to “sit with pain” and not move to “fade it” or “fix it.” This could be her pain or their own. It should not be something debilitating. Pain should provide a strength rather than a weakness.

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.

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I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments. Meaning of “The Invitation” The book goes on to devote a chapter to each stanza, the author writing with the kind of unselfconscious self-importance you recall from the last time you were seated next to a bore in Economy Class. This person loves the sound of her own authorial voice, and she makes pronouncement after pronouncement about how to life The Good Life but offers no data beyond her own life experience to support her thesis. She writes like an authority, or perhaps a prophetess, without giving the reader any reason to take her seriously. What are her credentials? She certainly never bothers to tell us.

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. I referred to it from time to time over the years, either when I sought it for inspiration or simply came across it by accident. And then, recently, I transcribed it as a gift for a friend who I thought would draw a similar level of comfort and inspiration from it during a hard time. In reading it again, I felt the magic spark of the person I used to be ignite and resolved that now, after so many years, it was finally time to find this book. It was maybe her youth that impacted her need to search for new ideas. It is said that she struggled with a sense of loneliness and not belonging in her childhood. This had a number of impacts on her as she threw herself into reading and writing in her adolescent years and gave her a sense of wanderlust and adventure in her twenties in her search to find a home. 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.imagine, it makes you question all this trying, this dark certainty that everything... More The Invitation Oriah is first and foremost a story-teller, a lover of words and symbols and the stories that lift our spirits, open our hearts and offer us ways to see patterns and create meaning in our lives. The focus of her life and work has been an on-going inquiry into the Sacred Mystery. Her writing, teaching and personal journey all explore how we can each become the individual we are at the deepest level of being and how we can co-create meaning together in the world. Blending humour, insight and compassion for our human struggles Oriah encourages herself and others to be ruthlessly honest and infinitely kind toward our own strengths and our weaknesses. 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... More The Dance Another example in the text is at the end of the fifth line of the first stanza in which Dreamer cuts off the line “if you are to dream” before revealing what the dream is. This makes the revelation, which follows in the next line, all the more impactful.

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... More from Opening The Invitation

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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. Her bestselling books and teachings blend honesty, compassion, and humor to encourage sacred self-discovery. Having faced her own adversities, Oriah urges infinite kindness toward our own and others’ imperfections. Her insights help readers embrace their full humanity in all its rawness – fears, failures, passions, and purpose. Lessons from the Poem Oriah is first and foremost a story-teller, a lover of words and symbols and the stories that lift our spirits, open our hearts and offer us ways to see patterns and create meaning in our lives. The focus of her life and work has been an on-going inquiry into the Sacred Mystery. Her writing, teaching and personal journey all explore how we can each become the individual we are at the deepest level of being and how we can co-create meaning together in the world. Blending humor, insight and compassion for our human struggles Oriah encourages herself and others to be ruthlessly honest and infinitely kind toward our own strengths and our weaknesses.