Conscious Choice: A Welcome Invitation

August 2000 | Choice Books

A Welcome Invitation

by Mark Harris

"Books push their writer forward. The writer has to have ready the accumulation of what she is, at the point of the book, but the book, itself, will prove more than its writer. The act of writing, itself, is an evolution; from the Latin, Volvere, volvi, volutum, to roll. The unrolling of the secret scroll, the thing suspected but not realized until present."

— Jeanette Winterson, Art [Objects] (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)

I was driving in my car recently with my nine-year-old friend Lillian. She had just graduated from the third grade and I was taking her and her mother to the airport for an early summer trip. As Lillian explained to me, she was now officially a fourth grader, as of the very instant third grade ended. I’ve learned to consider this little girl something of a teacher, so being suddenly wise at this new level, I was curious to ask her something. I was also trying to pass the time. It was a forty-minute drive to the airport.

"Well, who would you consider your heroes now, Lillian?" I asked. She gave me one of her looks. It was that here-we-go-with-the-dumb-questions look. "I don’t have any heroes," she replied. I was surprised. "You must have some hero, someone you admire?" "Why would I?" she shot back. "No one’s ever rescued me." Then she added, "I mean, it’s not like I’ve ever been in a sinking ship and I was drowning."

I was taken aback. So a hero is the one who saves you. I’d been thinking more along the lines of words like admire or teach or inspire to describe the qualities of the hero. Yet as usual Lillian was onto something, if only in the most literal sense. For the heroes in our lives are rescuers of sorts. Through their courage, brilliance, and action they restore us to a certain faith in life’s possibilities. Perhaps especially when we flounder in life’s troubled seas, the hero’s story resuscitates us to the shores of our faith, in ourselves and in humanity.

The Hero in Ourselves

I couldn’t help but think about Lillian as I read Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s poignant book, The Invitation ($18.00, hardcover, 136 pages, first edition, May 1999, HarperSanFrancisco). You might say The Invitation is a paean to the hero in ourselves. Based on the Toronto-based Mountain Dreamer’s poem of the same title, The Invitation stands as an invocation to the authentic self-realized life. From the early misstep of an abusive marriage to a prolonged battle with chronic fatigue, Mountain Dreamer cuts through the contrivances of the usual self-help or inspirational books to tell a story of great poetic power, honesty, and psychological insight.

A divorced mother of two teenage sons, Mountain Dreamer describes how at one point in her life a deep fatigue nearly incapacitated her. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, her life changed drastically and devastatingly. She describes how she became just too tired to do all the things she thought the consummate wife and mother must do. Years of adjustment followed — years of scaled-down expectations and surrender to new limits. In a sense, they were years of just learning how to rest.

Clinically, her prolonged health battles appear to have been precipitated by two pregnancies. At a more psychospiritual level her illness, she suggests, became a protest against all the perfectionistic ideals she had imposed upon herself, ideals that invariably set her up to feel somehow incomplete and ultimately unfulfilled. In the journey to reclaim her health, Mountain Dreamer found herself compelled to write a kind of second draft on her life, editing out many old, self-limiting expectations as well as a husband and a career in social work.
She even changed her name, dropping her given name to adopt the name Mountain Dreamer (originally a ceremonial name given her during a healing retreat she had attended).

Certainly the experience of chronic illness tends to make a person more deeply appreciate what they do have in life. Taking nothing for granted and appreciating every little thing — every pleasure or accomplishment or act of kindness — can be the greatest gift. One learns to operate with a kind of highly tuned radar, always scanning the skies for signs of life, for reconnections with the spirit. The original poem "The Invitation," proved popular (it spread over the Internet and became a frequent reading at weddings, workshops, and other events) perhaps because it so resonates with this kind of tuned-in wisdom.

I think I’ve also learned that gratitude and enlightenment are not some Himalayan goal upon whose peak we seek to someday stand forever triumphant. Rather, they are more just moments in the course of living, moments in a fluid process of continually becoming. The growing sense of enlightenment earned in the course of recovery from some adversity can easily alternate with other, harder moments, where the friction associated with feeling victimized continues to scrape away at your hopes. The Invitation reminds us that spiritual growth is not always or even usually a steady, linear forward progression. But having enough of those grateful, hopeful moments, watching them build in our lives, is certainly a step in the right direction.

The Seamless Weave of Our Awareness

I was also enjoying thinking about love as I read the essays in The Invitation. But I’ll admit I’m a romantic, spiritual person by nature and perhaps easily drawn to books that speak to the higher plane of our passions in intimacy and sexual love. Frankly, I’ve grown weary of all the cynicism surrounding matters of love and relationships in our culture. A good example is a statement I ran across recently: "True love is just codependence with a better soundtrack." This is one of those comments that on first hearing sounds clever, but when you really consider the content, it is just false to the core.

As if there is something inherently flawed about human love. As if two human beings giving their heart and soul to each other automatically means something unhealthy. As if truly caring for another means sacrificing one’s own needs or psychological autonomy to the gods of all our own unseemly desperation or neediness.

Mountain Dreamer’s perspective celebrates the wild beauty of our passions, the beauty of falling in love, however untidy such desires may at times look to us. "It doesn’t interest me how old you are," she writes in one stanza of her poem, "I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool, for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive." I like that. Being willing to take risks; to be vulnerable; to fall flat on your face, possibly, just for a chance at love or to bring some new magic into your life.

I’ll admit, too, my impatience with the cynics is at least partly an impatience with myself, with the cautionary weight of my own fears. The antidote to fear offered in The Invitation is not to live impulsively, to be ruled always by your emotions. The people I know who live like that I can usually handle only in small doses. Mountain Dreamer rather challenges us to move through our fears, intelligently, to take measured risks to open up our lives, and not to let our past mistakes leave us paralyzed and paranoid. The gospel here is more one of striving for that integrated, balanced place within oneself, where intellect, emotions, and will all come together in the seamless weave of a mature and evolving awareness.

Shadow and Light

As I was writing this review, I happened to watch an interview with Bruce Springsteen in which he talked about his early inspiration in music. Springsteen candidly acknowledged that his obsession with music as a boy was largely driven by family problems. Battling his dad’s constant criticism, unsure of his place in the world, music became a channel through which he sought the internal emotional equilibrium otherwise lacking in his life. As he put it, there had to be something weird going on when a thirteen-year-old boy wants to sit in his room for eight hours a day practicing the guitar.

Of course, not all creativity or wisdom is a product of trouble in a person’s life. There is also something called inspiration. But in this world there is an awful lot of wisdom born in the shadows, and it can be a powerful kind of teacher. As Mountain Dreamer remarks, when the stadium lights are always on, the constant glare can make seeing difficult. As for her own story, it is a journey through both shadow and light, moving along a personal terrain where fear and betrayal, joy and sustenance—all that it means to be a feeling human being — have at one time or another resonated in her life’s dramas. It is also the story of the evolution of a life through a writer’s emerging creativity and voice.

Perhaps The Invitation is more than anything an elegy to that lighted place where life reaches out to itself, to our souls’ hunger for connection. Moving into a deeper intimacy with ourselves, examining our fears, forgiving ourselves more, loving ourselves more; we begin to uncover more of the love others have to share with us. This is a simple and powerful lesson and it is one all of us are challenged to learn over and over again. Along the path of her own spiritual schooling, Mountain Dreamer is able to share with us many moments of genuine grace and epiphany.

At the same time I was writing this review, I had become intensely preoccupied with the affairs of my own heart. New career opportunities were opening for me, opportunities that demanded I rearrange my life as well as ask others for help, if I was to truly take advantage of the creative challenges before me. I was also discovering in myself new and abiding feelings of love for someone I feared just could not come toward me.

I was nervous and distracted. Yet I also felt gloriously vital in these feelings. In this new backdrop of possibilities, the most evocative, imaginative rhythms played. I could still hear other, more dissonant notes, played on the minor keys of old fears and uncertainty. Somehow I willingly embraced all of it, trusting that no matter what internal force was driving, I was on a path uniquely my own.

I realized that I was having trouble writing about The Invitation because I was so in the thick of living its message. I was daring to dream of meeting my own heart’s longing, in the work I do and in the love I feel. I was mustering unfamiliar courage in striving to express all that I ached for in life. And, I was doing it all without any certainty whatsoever that I could control or even predict the outcome.

Not bad, I thought.

The Invitation ($18.00, Hardcover, 136 pages, first edition, May 1999, HarperSanFrancisco, 1999)

Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: