I want to know if you can sit with pain...

The Invitation, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer has become a guideline on how to live my life. I can't count the number of times I've read it, and still I learn from it, let it open me.

That line "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" is so powerful to me. This weekend was all about the human condition... the intense stuff, the lust and longing and ache, the fear, the jealousy, the hate, the pain, the raw inner guts of us, not always pretty or graceful, not easy to smell, taste, feel, live... but the things that make you feel alive... and the other side of those things... the contentment, the belonging, the rapture, the love, the joy, the knowing.

Before the influence of The Invitation (and of the person who brought it to my life) I would have run.... but instead I let it wash over me, through me, I felt it fully. The result... I feel.... peaceful, empowered. *smiling*

Funny how a change in self (for me over the last 3 or so years) changes those we draw to us, those who enter our lives, those who affect us, touch us, those who are willing to risk.

I am... grateful, very very grateful.

Closing In

I'm feeling a little... cramped, the world closing in around me, and not a moment where I'm not accountable to someone. I long for a little time to just.... be... think, read, meditate, write - whatever. Clearly I have to make this happen, and soon. I feel myself losing touch with myself - never a good thing. A smothered Spirit doesn't grow, doesn't learn, doesn't see the world and feel it.