“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.” ~ Oriah

Poetic, honest, unabashed… Oriah 2016-09-06 14.25.11will draw you into her prose of clarity and truth while setting forth an invitation to connect deeply to who we are; to live in communion with life and all its forms and to allow the spirit of life to excite the mundane as we return to wholeness.

I have reflected back to Oriah’s inspiration time again, seeking to re-discover myself and my essence. In today’s overstimulated culture of busyness and inexhaustible to do’s I find The Invitation a refreshing reprieve.

A beautiful meditation is offered at the close of each chapter to nurture and guide your journey. I have no doubt you will appreciate as I do this beautiful, deep, and profound walk down that same path that so many of us have travelled again and again…

Enjoy these snippets from the introduction…

“The Invitation” is a declaration of intent, a map into the longing of the soul, the desire to live passionately, face-to-face with ourselves and skin-to-skin with the world around us, to settle for nothing less than what is real. This book is a journey into the territory mapped out by “The Invitation.” If we are to traverse this territory together, there is something you should know. Because simply saying “yes” to “The Invitation,” feeling the pull of the heart or the quickening of the blood that urges movement forward, is not the same thing as actually making the journey.

I want to live with deep intimacy every day of my life. I am guided, sometimes driven, by an ache to take the necessary risks that will let me live close to what is within and around me. And I am somethimes afraid that it will all be too much, that I will not have, or be connected to, whatever it takes to be with it all, to bear the exquisite beauty and bone-wrenching sorrow of being fully alive…”

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“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 and every momen, 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.

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.”