The Invitation

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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. 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 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. It is clear from the start that she is not looking for a simple relationship. She is seeking out something deeper and longer-lasting. It is also safe to assume that she would prefer the listener to know her in the same ways she is seeking to know them.

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!” 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 InvitationThis is a story about surrendering from a woman who has found surrender impossible. This is a story about stopping the war, my war, the one I have fought all my life, the one I have not been able to give up despite the fact that I have lost every battle and sin cerely declared myself out of action over and over again. It's a story about stopping the war with what is within and around me because I have simply had enough of fighting... More "The Call" 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 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 third stanza, the speaker begins with her last “It doesn’t interest me” statement for now. At this time the point she is trying to make it less obvious. She refers to a moon that represents her lover’s life, whether that be emotionally or physically, and the “planets” that “square” it. These are the people, topics, or issues that revolve around the listener’s life. They are exterior and mean nothing. Because she first shared the prose-poem "The Invitation" (in 1994) with those who had come to participate in ceremony with her, the poem and her subsequent books first appeared under the name Oriah Mountain Dreamer. This led to all kinds of interesting misunderstandings (Eg.-people assumed she was an elderly or deceased Native American man.) Interviewers often begin conversations with, "Now that's not a real name, is it?" Oriah, while deeply honouring the spiritual tradition from which she has received her name, understands that in our modern culture such a name is bound to prompt reactions. She even admits to sometimes sharing the prejudice of thinking that people using names like Mountain Dreamer might be a little flaky! So, she good naturedly explains, when asked, that Oriah Mountain Dreamer is indeed a "real" name, although not her birth name, and reflects on the fact that in our culture what is considered “most real” is that which indicates familial association (inheritance rights, marital status and/or patrilineage) while some other cultures would consider a spiritual name more “real.”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. 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 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 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.

The Invitation

My pastor pressed this book into my hands, telling me how strongly it had influenced her and how she wanted to do a series of podcasts about it. Clearly this book has an audience whom it inspires and nourishes. Oriah Mountain Dreamer grew up in a very religious household and small community in Ontario, Canada. Her family taught her Christian tradition. However, her family would move around a lot which gave her the experience of different ways of thinking. Her parents were both teachers, which added to her education, and provided her with a wide array of philosophies. In her early life, she would spend time in the wilderness. The speaker states that she is not interested in knowing what “you do for a living.” The “you” she is speaking to is the intended listener and her prospective lover. The first stanza outlines that she cares much more about what this person “ache[s] for” than what their life consists of at the present moment. She sees through the surface level definition an occupation brings and is reading to meet this person’s “heart’s longing.”