a gift from a reader....and from an author....

ahhh...just headin' to a shower and bed.........
gonna just collapse when i came to turn the puter off
and found this sent to me as a comment on the last blog.
an offering.........
it's incredible. and you know what?! i have this book
somewhere......think it's time to bring it back out!
thank you, thank you, thank you!

>>>>>>>>


Excerpts from “The Invitation”


“When I imagine myself as an old woman at the end of my life and ask myself how I will evaluate my time here, there is only one question that concerns me: Did I love well? 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. This is what brings me to the journey. I do not want to live any other way. And sometimes, I allow myself to imagine that each moment in which we love well by simply being all of who we are and being fully present allows us to give back something essential to the Sacred Mystery that sustains all life.”
”I cannot save myself, nor those I love, from the sorrow that is part of life. Knowing this, it is tempting to protect myself from pain by simply closing a little to life, especially in the areas where I have been hurt, in the areas that matter most…We live in a culture that wants only the times of fullness, that often denies outright the fading times. We have forgotten that there can be no full moon without the existence at other times of the tiny sliver of light surrounded by darkness. The fullness of summer is held, on the opposite side of the wheel, by the time of the longest night. To be separated from these cycles of the world, from the births and deaths, is to be separated from life itself. But still we work frantically, seeking the knowledge that will put humans outside this natural cycle of blossoming and decay.
“And all the while, deep inside, I know what I have always known: that the knowledge will never be enough. This is the secret we keep from ourselves. And the moment is revealed, we become aware of a need for something else: for the wisdom to live with what we do not know, what we cannot control, what is painful – and still choose life. And all the while, wisdom asks us to choose life. She does not want us to just continue, to hang on, to survive. She asks us to experience life actively, fully, every day – to show up for all of it.”
Oriah Mountain Dreamer