The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

The Invitation

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
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
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.

Peaceful Words For Times of Conflict (Reprint)

The late Chaim Stern, was liturgist for the reform movement of Judaism. Let some of his writings speak with hope that they help in further discussions of difficult and complex problems ahead. They are taken from his book, Day by Day.

For the times that I could have made peace with my neighbor but picked a quarrel, forgive me; and forgive me, too, for the times when I could have accepted with grace an offering of friendship or reconciliation but did not choose to listen. At times, in my willfulness, I may have closed my heart to the possibility of a healing word: Today - and tomorrow -- let my heart be open.

***

May I be among those who are hard to provoke and easy to appease. May I be a friend of peace at home and at work, and everywhere I go. When I am angry let me reflect whether my anger is proportionate to its cause and appropriate in its expression.

***

Keep me from stubborn insistence on always having my way, even when my cause is doubtful, and the truth is unclear. Keep me however from conceding to wrong and from accepting violence as a way to resolve disputes. O help me to walk serenely and with good conscience, to accept that I am not the only one with integrity. May I seek the good, even when it seems not to my own advantage.

***

Make the door of my heart wide enough to receive all whom I may meet this day. And make it too narrow to allow entrance to envy, pride and strife.

***

Help me to enter into the mind of the one who stands before me, and keep me alive to the feelings of each one present. Let no word or act - mine or theirs - divide me from my kin. Give us all, instead, a quick eye for little kindnesses, and that we may be ready in doing them and gracious in receiving them.

Wisdom

I just read Learning to Love Growing Old by Jere Daniel on the Psychology Today website. I want to share with you the research findings on wisdom:

A team of European researchers -- no surprise there -- has taken on the challenge to isolate the features of wisdom in clinical detail. From their ongoing studies of the aging mind, psychologists Paul B. Baltes and Ursula M. Staudinger, both of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, define wisdom:

• It's an expertise that wraps information in the human context of life and relates it to generational and historical flow.
• It is factual and procedural knowledge about the world and human affairs.
• It mingles insight and judgment involving complex and uncertain matters of the human condition; there is an appreciation for and understanding of the uncertainties of life.
• It involves a fine-tuned coordination of cognition, motivation, and emotion, knowledge about the self and other people and society.
• It carries knowledge about strategies to manage the peaks and valleys of life.
• It integrates past, present, and future.

A product of cultural and knowledge-based factors, rather than biologically based mechanics of the mind, wisdom accumulates with time -- but only among those who remain open to new experiences. If we must insist on outwitting the constraints of biology, then wisdom -- and not the scalpel -- is our thing.