The Invitation

The Invitation
- 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 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 dreamt last night I was at a palatial home, the White House maybe. It was after hours, and after an event. The young aides were angry with me. I just looked at them, they were upset about something that didn't really matter, except in their circumscribed world. I left free, but alone by myself into the night with sweeping surfaces of the large building lit next to the empty drive and garden, and the lights of the city below me.

I'm an aide at work and I spend my week worrying about things that don't really matter in the big picture. I really don't need the anger and frustration that come with the big performance.

What matters here is the beauty of the beckoning night and the freedom I feel with it stretched out before me.

Journaling April 5

I know the texture of this soil, dark and deep black matter in furrows lying in their valleys. Having brought up what was buried and hidden with no intention, it was simply over-turned. For me a sadness has surfaced, come over with the turning like a blackened statue of the goddess, her meaning partly in the past. The farmer knows this is treasure.

My hands are rough and strong like those of my grandfathers and grandmothers. But next to me there stands a bird, a crane or heron and I know my place is not theirs here tilling this soil. The bird that lifted me off the grass, up with it in a pull of energy. I'm to follow it now. What does this mean here now? - not just the lift-off of youth, but also the sadness of what's been forgotten, hidden away, and lost.

And now this one white bird, and there is something in that white and strong, powerful wings with oiled feathers perfectly in place. Voyager. Bringer of something new. Vision is a powerful thing.

In the moment. My right foot down in mud and water. Down on firmness. And up and just above there is a different perspective. Gathering a view and dropping back down. It's hard to show the imagination in the midst of a busy square full of voices and happenings.

I'm not comfortable. It's awkward. I swallow, so easy to say silent at the margins, except it becomes painful after a while. And it keeps my feet on the ground and then I fly farther away. This is not freedom. It's being tethered with a long leash. Better to live in service and be free to leave.

This flight is the above mirroring the below. It's an illusion - going up is going below, and that's why everyone is keeping so busy flat on the ground. Change is not coming, change is here. There is no seeing above, or below, far into the future to plan for. There is seeing into now and realizing what it means for each of us. I know I feel alone and over-whelmed. I'm probably not alone in that.

The flight is into what we know that we don't remember. She resurfaces. The farmer knows his life has changed. It doesn't matter what she used to mean now the dark valleys are open to being known. He makes new meaning, one felt in his bones. He knows what he must do and he doesn't know how. The same for each of us. I need to look.

This Moment

There's a moment in spring when the forest still looks wizened and blasted by winter. Desolate of cover or food. But the trees put out small, tender flowers and leaves at the very ends of their branches. They look decorated like candelabras in an empty house. They are exposed in an environment that still offers harshness, that isn't pretty and hasn't been for a while. They do it anyway, because it's time and what they do.

Benedicto

I read Abbey at the time when I chose to go into the environmental field. I find the contrast between Abbey's experience of deep imagination, wildness, and creativity in the world hard to bare within the bureaucratic settings we deal with. But the soul needs to live regardless and for it to live we may have to learn to hold both. I think this is my primary work right now. To hold the dream within the same container as waking consciousness.

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous,

leading to the most amazing view.

May your rivers flow without end,

meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,

past temples and castles and poets' towers

into a dark primeval forest

where tigers belch and monkeys howl,

through miasmal and mysterious swamps

and down into a desert of red rock,

and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm

where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs,

where deer walk across the white sand beaches,

where storms come and go

as lightning clangs upon the high crags,

where something strange and more beautiful

and more full of wonder than

your deepest dreams waits for you--

beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Edward Abbey

p.s. I rediscovered this poem through a website for the Power of Poetry festival in Logan, Ohio in an essay by Alan Cohen.