I love you. The "Final" Invitation.

 Finding Our Way Home

I want to know if you can be alone

 

with yourself

 

and if you truly like the company you keep

 

in the empty moments.

 

~~

         

"TELL ME ABOUT A MOMENT of real solitude, a moment when you were with yourself and felt yourself at the center, a moment when you could feel the world, the stars, the galaxies spinning around you."

 

"Tell me have you met yourself? Have you been able to step outside the business of life for just one moment and look in from the outside, feeling yourself whole and separate and yet with the world."

 

"There is a tension in living fully, what often feels like an opposition between our longing for the solitude where we can find our own company and the desire to be fully and intimately with the world. When we learn to live with both the desire for separation and the longing for union, we find that they are simply two ways of knowing the same ache: we all just want to go home."

 

"I have come to accept that no matter how much I am able to be with myself, no matter how much I like my own company, I still long to sit close to and at times to merge completely with another in deep intimacy. This too is coming home. The completeness of self is found when we can be alone and when we can bring all of who we are to another, receiving and being received fully."

 

"This is the sacred marriage: the coming together of two who have each met themselves on the road. When two who have this intimacy with themselves are fully with each other- whether for a lifetime or for a moment- the world is held tenderly and fed by the image they create simply by being together. They can be friends or family, lovers or life partners, or simply two strangers whose lives intersect for a moment.

 

They may be telling each other stories, or making love, or sharing a task, or sitting in silence together. It doesn't matter. If having met myself in the empty moments, I am willing and able to bring all of who I am to another, receiving all of who they are, then we are truly together. In that moment in the image our being together creates, we are the manifestation of life holding, creating and feeding life. This is the fullness of the homecoming for which we all long.

 

~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer.

* Do I feel like crying? Yes. 

Do I want to cry? No. 

I feel the full 'gentle' force of this book like a visit from a stranger who has seen and understood the deepest, darkest recesses of my heart. 

 

The End.

I love you. The Invitation #2

 The Longing.

"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."

         

Chapter two details the heart's longing. The crux of love has always been about deep longings. 

For it is the longing that transcend the physical, the mental into the spiritual realm. 

It is Love Longing for Itself.

"And if  we are to be lovers for the first time or again, after many times, let the lovemaking be filled with shyness and discovery the way it was, or could have been, when we were sixteen: today a kiss that lingers, a touch on the back of my neck that I can feel for hours: tomorrow a light caress across my breast that makes my breath catch. I want to savour each discovery of touch as the infinite unfolding of the other. I want to slow it all down, to wander around wet, aching for what is to come next, so I will know when I have been fully entered, whether by your body, your story, or just simply the moment that passes between us."

        - Oriah Mountain Dreamer

 

 

I love you. The Invitation.

Accepting the Invitation. 

A privilege to start the book, perhaps I shall document excerpts to further internalise my understanding and learning.

The first chapter has many gems and anecdotes. This one paragraph deserves keeping;

"There are a thousand ways to love other people and the world- with our touch, our words, our silences, our work, our presence. I want to love well. This is my hunger. I want to make love to the world by the way I live in it, by the way I am with myself and others every day. So I seek to increase my ability to be with the truth in each moment, to be with what I know, the sweet and the bitter. I want to stay aware of the vastness of what I do not know. This is what brings me to the journey, I do not want to live any other way..."

        ~ Oriah Mountain Dreamer

 

There is much truth, humility and hunger packed into one single paragraph.