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.