The Invitation

I first came across this when I was working at South Pacific Private Hospital, and I loved it then and it hasn't lost its perfume over the years, it's still wild and untamed and joyous... Enjoy


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 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.

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 faithlessand therefore trustworthy.

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.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on 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 center 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.

by
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
copyright © 1999 by Oriah Mountain Dreamer.

Celebrity Marriages

Why am I irritated that Kim Kardashian is filing for divorce after 72 days of marriage? Because it debases the entire concept of marriage. Clearly the entire thing was a ratings game. Fine. But she has trivialized something meaningful.


When I read news like this, and then I hear people squawk against gay marriage, because it 'should only be between a man and a woman' I get cranky. If fools can spend ten million dollars on a ratings extravaganza, if reality shows can end with engineered marriages, then why can't people in committed relationships get married and share 401K's and bank accounts and children?

Birthday Wishes

Here's my quote of the year -

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of 48

H.L. Mencken US writer and humorist


And here I am, 48 years old and very happy to be here!

Loving what we want to see...

“I loved something I made up, something that’s just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn’t see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all.”
Scarlett in Gone with the Wind

I see people do this all the time...

the older I get, the more I love poetry...

Watching the Hour on BBC America, with all the family, seeing 1956 come to life again, and one of the characters quotes e e cummings. What a genius that man was... there is something about his love poetry especially, which is just so tender and beautiful


somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands



do so love the 'net - where else would I find such a perfect image! and thanks to Pilar Pedrosa Pilar for putting it on her body!
and to Will Cook for the beautiful flower photo

September 11th...

I've been reading about September 11th and seen some new and thoughtful photos I hadn't seen before, so I'm putting here, in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the event that happened a few blocks away from where I live... We were not here on the day, we arrived about 5 months afterwards, but the day is very alive here (as indeed, it was in Sydney, which is where I was at the time)



I found the photo by Thomas Hoepker in an article in the Guardian about it

Then I saw this image taken by Matt Weber


which lead me to the poem by Auden...



Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.


In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.



Love how poetry can put everything in perspective, and show the terror and the beauty, the mundane and the exceptional, and what you see all depends where look...

Independence Day

I was writing about Independence day in my tarot blog and quoted from John Donne, so I went to look it up to make sure that I got it right..



Meditation XVII

No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.


I know I often worry about the cost of a liberal arts education, and though it didn't give me the clear career path I thought I wanted in my 20's, it's serving me well these nearly 30 years later, as I recall poems and writers I read then, and who speak even louder to me now...