The Invitation

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As ‘The Invitation’ progresses she adds that she doesn’t care about her listener’s children, past, or the mask they wear in public. Everything she needs to know comes from within her lover’s soul. The poem concludes with the speaker expressing her interest in knowing if her listener could live within their own mind, without the company of others. Their interior fortitude is a deal-breaker for her. Oriah is the author of several best-selling books: The Invitation (now translated into more than fifteen languages), The Dance, and The Call: Discovering Why You Are Here. Her book, What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul, explores the challenges, rewards, and necessity of doing our creative work. Opening the Invitation is a small book that shares Oriah’s story of writing and sharing her much-loved poem, “ The Invitation.” All five of Oriah’s books are published by HarperONE, San Francisco. Using story and sharing meditations Oriah’s writing explores how to follow the thread of our deepest heart's longing into a life where we can choose joy without denying the difficulties we each face. Facing the challenges and finding the joy of living who we are is further explored on her Sounds True CD, Your Heart’s Prayer. Oriah has shared her insights and stories with audiences throughout the world at conferences and retreats and through radio and TV appearances (CBC, TVO, Oprah, NPR, PBS, Wisdom Network.) 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. 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. In the first stanza of ‘The Invitation’ the speaker begins as she does approximately half of the stanzas, with the phrase, “It doesn’t interest me.” While the line will become commonplace and lose some of its impact after reading it in different iterations, the first appearance is impactful. It is an interesting way to begin ‘The Invitation’ and provides a pleasing hook for the reader who will want to know more.

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, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human. The poem begins with the speaker making two initial statements about what she does and does not want to know about a possible lover. First, she does not care what they do for a living. She does care about their dreams and what their heart aches for secretly. The speaker goes on to add that she wants her life and that of her lover to be filled with the great adventure of being alive. 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. Oriah is, first and foremost, a storyteller and spiritual teacher. Raised in rural Ontario, her transcultural upbringing nourished an early calling to explore life’s deepest mysteries. Oriah studied social work and philosophy but found her passion in sharing stories that uplift our spirits.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. The speaker again asks the listener if they would be able to live with disappointment and loss, as well as failure. This is not necessarily their own, it could be hers as well. She wants a lover who can take it all in stride and remain strong in the face of defeat. They should be able to take power from an upset and “shout” out that they have not given up. Their soul is still strong. 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.

The book starts off with a prelude of questions followed by a poem called “The Dance.” That, then, becomes the basis of her book. Each chapter begins with a section of the poem and then is expanded and explored by Ms. Mountain Dreamer’s (a name given her at the end of a ceremony in which she participated) own story along with other examples of those she has known. The end of each chapter is a meditation or time of reflective questions on how the chapter relates to your life and what you might want to unravel about that topic. Some of the chapters explore slowing down, relationships, sorrow and anger and others—all the while reinforcing that we are loving enough/compassionate enough in whatever stage we find ourselves, no matter what life tosses our way. She also stresses why slowing down to do the dance of life for those of us who find ourselves over-booked, over-work without time for the important things.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 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..."The Invitation" was originally published in slightly different form, in "Dreams of Desire," a collection of poetry by Oriah Mountain Dreamer and actually the title, dreams of desire, is more relevant than the invitation. Simply because as a mortal, unless as an individual, we have dreams of desire therefore a cause, what is the point of existence? That said, the person who recommended it to me did so out of love, not spite. She’s a smart person who’s a force for good in the world, so I can assume only that the problem isn’t so much that the book is bad as that I am so outside the target audience that it was written in a language I can’t understand - kinda like how I can only look on, baffled and impatient, when someone coos over their housecat.

As for the author’s recipe for happiness, well, it veers from the courageous embrace of life in all of its messiness to the irresponsible pursuit of whatever impulses may be attempting to drive us in the moment. I buy the former, but reject the latter: it’s narcissism posing as actualization. The syntax of the piece is very straightforward but made more impactful by instances of enjambment. The technique can be seen between the first and second lines of each stanza as the speaker reveals one thing she does or does not care to know about her lover. It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled 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.

The power of this piece of poetry comes from its list-like format. As a reader moves through the lines the previous statements build off one another until one is able to imagine the mental, emotional, and spiritual outline of the speaker’s ideal lover. The second stanza contains eight lines in which she brushes off pointless bits of information such as how old “you are.” Age does not define who or how she loves. Instead, one piece of information she would be interested in is a great risk this person took. Or perhaps a time they looked like a fool for something they loved. Her ideal lover pursues the great “adventure of being alive.” Oriah has a long and unusual history with her name. In 1984, at thirty years of age, after the onset of severe Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, she had a dream where several elderly women- those she calls Grandmothers in the dream- told her to change her given name to Oriah as part of the process of healing. Nervous about doing something others might see as strange, but desperate to be well, she took the name Oriah and has been called this (by everyone but her mother) since that time. Twenty years later, while doing a book tour, on three successive nights, in three different cities, she was told by people at the bookstores she was visiting that Oriah means light of God in Hebrew, and that it is an ancient Jewish custom to change a patient’s name when doing a healing, to invite new and healing energies. 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... More from the chapter of The Invitation “The Commitment”, imagine, it makes you question all this trying, this dark certainty that everything... More The Invitation