Category: Spirituality (Page 3 of 4)

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 centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled 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 faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

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.

I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at 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 centre 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 Dreaming,
from the book The Invitation
published by HarperONE, San Francisco,
1999 All rights reserved

A couple of quotes to stand out (of which there are many) :

“When you forgive you love. When you love God shines his light on you”.

“Happiness is only real when shared”.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

I Go Back to May 1937 (from The Gold Cell) by Sharon Olds
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch,
the red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head,
I see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her,
its sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb,
all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live.
I take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

It’s becoming quite common for me, when experiencing what seems to be a cold, to find words morphing or sentences shifting to take on different meaning. So how apt I thought, when I read “Most of my friends are Starlight”. Coinciding at a time when I’m learning to see people as their true selves. We may be carbon based life forms but do we see our hidden Starlight?

Picture the scene: You’re dead at last but you wish to make contact with the mortals you remember here on Earth. The medium is on the platform and has noticed your presence, and there in the audience are the people you wish to communicate with. What exactly do you say, bearing in mind we’re not able to talk directly to them as we once did?
So I pipe up “it’s Chris”. Now due to the fact time doesn’t exist as such when you’re dead, it has passed your attention that several years have passed since you snuffed it and they actually know a couple of people both living and dead with the same name. It’s also fair to assume that a specific name might not be conveyed clearly as mostly thoughts with images are used.

So how able are you to describe your identity by using imagery?