Sometimes I get so tired. There are days when I feel like I just can’t possibly keep going – keep trying to change the world, keep trying to get everything done for everyone and keep trying not to feel like I’ve failed when I can’t do it all or when I fall down… Sigh.
So, as I read the book “The Invitation” by Oriah Mountain Dreamer, the following excerpt resonated with me strongly. It contains good reminders to me – to remember that what I do (or don’t do) doesn’t define me. Or that I can live every moment of my life, experiencing it all without judgment. And (most important to me!) that it’s okay for me to stop and rest sometimes, caring for myself with at least as much energy as I give to caring for others!
Hope you enjoy!
It’s easy to lose sight of the divine in the partner who takes out the garbage, and easier still if he or she doesn’t. It’s hard to remember to look for and see the beloved in the parking attendant or the check-out clerk we encounter. We need shared gestures, small ceremonies that help us pay attention, that let us see and honor the mystery of the other every day. This is the commitment my soul longs to make to the world.
And I want to stop trying to do this.
It is not the being, not even the doing that exhausts. It is the trying: trying to be present, to be awake, to hold the whole world, to be better, more self-aware, more conscious. My hopes for us are real: I want to help create a world where the very idea of toxic waste would raise such a cry of anguish from the people as to make it unthinkable; where we would move, pulled by the heart, to care for the poor, the ill, the dying and despairing without debating whether they are deserving, without fear of contamination, seeing ourselves in each person.
But as honorable as these desires to make a difference may be, I know my motives are mixed. I am afraid that if I am not accomplishing something I will disappear. I will have nothing to offer you when we meet. I want to be able to be able to live for a day, a month, a year – even a life – that wouldn’t make a good story. If I have nothing to tell you when we meet and you ask me what has been happening, I want to be fully content with this. I want to be able to occupy my life to the corners and for this to be enough.
There are places inside me where the soothing balm of rest has never penetrated. I long for a small respite from the reaching, a moment of sweet stillness, quiet darkness, the great silence that can penetrate and loosen the small, hard knots of endless trying. I want to quit running from my own tiredness. I want to be willing and able to move only as fast as I am capable of moving while still remaining connected to the impulse to move from deep within, stopping when I have lost that slender thread of desire and having the courage and faith to wait, in stillness, until I find it again.
This is what I ache for: intimacy with myself, others, and the world, intimacy that touches the sacred in all that is life. This ache, this longing is the thread that guides me back through the labyrinth of compromises I have made, back to my soul’s desires. And sometimes I am afraid of my desires – afraid of what they will ask of me, what vision of myself or the world they will offer that may demand a sacrifice of my carefully cultivated way of seeing. If we are never consumed by the transforming fire of our desires, we risk falling in love with the sweet ache of longing, the daydream of “what if…” or “someday…”
The willingness to live our desires takes courage. So many times our desires have been used against us, used to sell us what someone else wanted us to buy. Moving towards our desire for deep commitment to Spirit, we have been sold blind obedience; opening to our desire to love, we have been sold an abandonment of self; seeking to embrace our desire for beauty, we have been sold everything from cars to clothes, exotic vacations to plastic surgery. We have been sold a lifestyle, when what our soul desired was life.
To taste our longing, to feel the ache, we risk finding our soul’s desire. We risk falling short of fulfilling those desires. We risk living our desires fully.
