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.
It doesn't interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life's betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
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.
I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
"Yes."
It doesn't interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.
It doesn't interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.
We are all tainted by the lower selves our higher selves come into contact with but it is in that place where lesser and higher collide where that special something called our humanness and humanity merge... where our humanness stretches us toward lower self and our humanity stretches us back toward our higher self... In this agitation and discomfort the pearls of our live are formed...
rudi
Perhaps this explains a little better just what some of the words or lines mean in this piece of prose:-
"We often look for someone we can trust more than we trust ourselves. Perhaps this is because we know how often we betray ourselves.
I suddenly realized that the people in my life who are the most trustworthy — those who tell the truth, even when the truth is hard — are not those who always keep their agreements with me. Those who can be faithless — who can bear the responsibility of breaking an agreement with someone when the alternative is to betray themselves—are trustworthy.
As the original version of “The Invitation” was copied and shared by people all over the world, the most frequent change made to it was to substitute the word faithful for the word faithless. I received phone calls and letters asking, sometimes demanding, that I explain my use of the word faithless. People didn’t like it. It made them uncomfortable.
If we cannot live with our need to renew agreements we have made, we break the only promise we really owe each other—to be truthful. This means finding both the courage to be truthful with ourselves and a way to live with how our actions affect others, even when there is no ill intent and no one to blame.
We have all been the betrayer and the betrayed. If we cannot acknowledge this we will find ourselves harsh and unforgiving, unable to grieve for the times we have betrayed ourselves.
When an agreement that is important to us is broken, we feel hurt and angry. And if an agreement is broken but we pretend that it has not been violated, we learn to distrust ourselves or those others when the truth is revealed. The real damage of betrayal is in the lies we tell one another and ourselves, the lies that cause us to lose faith in our ability to recognize and act on the truth.
Being trustworthy, not betraying ourselves, is, in part, about recognizing moments or situations when we are likely to be untrustworthy and seeking the counsel of people who love us and are willing and able to be honest with us. This may mean that we will sometimes hear things we do not want to hear. It is almost always means slowing things down a little and considering that we may be wrong, that we may not be trustworthy in that moment.
Refusing to betray ourselves is not a license to break agreement on a whim, to disregard the very real repercussions of our actions on others. The hard part , the place where we hope wisdom will find us, is in deciding where and when we must break a promise to be true to ourselves. We must weigh the cost to our soul if we keep our agreement—the cost to that which is essential to who we are—against the cost to others if the agreement is broken.
Sometimes we may to decide to make a sacrifice for another. Ask any parent about the small daily sacrifices.
Tell me, can you do this? Can you take the choice that’s for life even when that choice is hard, when doing so means others will see you as faithless? Can you make the choice without putting yourself or the other person—no matter who is the betrayed, who is the betrayer in this moment—out of your heart? This is what I want to know. This is what I want us to learn together to teach each other in the way we hold each other when the choices are hard."
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