The Invitation
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.
~Oriah Mountain Dreamer

another letter

I've been meaning to write to you for ages. It's been over 4 years since I have seen you, since we have spoken. I don't know if you have gotten any of my letters. I suppose most of them are verbal now, anyway.

There's so much I have been wanting to tell you, to explain to you... I've been reading through our old emails, blog posts and online chat records, at times laughing, at times crying, and at times cringing... I knew at the time you were crazy, but did you know I was that unbalanced (because really, you could have said something)? I'm trying to pinpoint when it was that I pulled my head out of my ass, but apparently it was such a long and slow process that I didn't notice anything dramatic until well after the official dislodging. I guess we were both really young. We thought we were invincible - you always more so than me. But I thought you were unbreakable, unstoppable. A celebrity, superhero status-type thing.

I really want to show you a hoop video I am making. It's for you, though not complete. It's hard for me to ever feel like things are good enough to give to you. It has to be perfect. Because you were perfect. Full of imperfections - and hell, you basically broke my heart - but perfect nonetheless.

Truth, you really pissed me off sometimes. One minute you were so impenetrable and the next unusually sensitive... it used to shock me when I'd realize you could be hurt. By me. It was just a really rocky time - I wasn't myself and was really overly sensitive about things. I needed so much sleep. I'm sorry for not being more patient with you. More understanding. More giving. Again - I guess I was young. And sick. Whatever. Does it even matter anymore? Why do I still feel the need to apologize or atone for something? It just was. We just were.

But mostly everything was good, once emotions were aligned... I could have flown with you beside me. So much energy. Before you it had been years since I had met someone that I could laugh with that much. I used to come home after seeing you with my stomach muscles actually hurting from the laughter. You could also make me angrier than anyone... you just had this ability to hit every single nerve in me, good ones and not so good ones, in a direct manner. Maybe I wasn't ready for it.

I've grown in 4 years. A lot of it is your fault.

I moved your picture to a new space in my house. I put candles by you that I light in the evenings. There's also a teapot next to the picture that I really love, just in case. Not really knowing when you'll be around again, I just sort of wait now, eyes and heart open. I used to notice a lot more.

Sometimes I think I see you on the metro or in NW near my office. It always takes me by total surprise and I believe for a split second it could be you, knowing full well in some other part of my logical brain that it's not possible. Time slows down. My heart does that flippy floppy stall thing anyway, my spine gets straighter, my eyes sharpen and my hearing gets sort of fuzzed out - all in an instant, and then it passes again. Time resumes and the sound comes back on. Sometimes I kick myself, and other times I just let it go.

I remember getting the call about you. I was at work at that job I hated (ok, at one of the jobs I've had and hated). I thought it was a joke. I had just gotten your letter and I was writing back to you, trying to weigh my words and say the right things. The problem is I can't just send a one page letter - it has to be this epically long memento of doodles with different pens and the envelope has to be just so and decorated appropriately. It takes me so much time because I always write in spurts, and I am also forgetful... but I wasn't finished with it. I remember thinking it was too whiny at times, so there was a whole chunk I was getting rid of. I didn't want to bore you.

But the phone rang.

That was my job at the time, to answer the phones. I was a receptionist that did as little work as possible, which may or may not have contributed to my getting fired a few months later. But on this day I was actually working, because I remember being totally focused on the data entry I was doing, and I was just about to get up to copy some checks that had come in the mail for our membership fees.

But the phone rang. So I put the checks back down and answered.

The last time I saw you we swung on the swing set near your house. Everything was relaxed and easy. For the first time in months I wasn't mad at you anymore, you were not having to walk on egg shells and weigh your words, afraid I would twist them into something else. It wasn't awkward and it wasn't overly dramatic or even rushed. I knew you were leaving. You knew you were leaving. I will never, ever forget the way you looked at me and how that felt. It is because of you that I believe in the possibility of the perseverance of love. Beneath all of the residual bitterness, beneath the history of bickering, behind the days of avoiding phone calls and ranty email exchanges "explaining things"... under all of that was a communal understanding. We moved, we loved, without a need for words. When I drove home that night I remember thinking that I would probably never see you again. I figured you were bigger than this place now... but I always assumed I would talk to you. At least at some point in the 2 years we'd talk, right? And who looks past 2 years when you are 22 years old?

That stupid phone call. Like a nuclear mushroom cloud right in the middle of everything. Boom.

Nothing was the same after that phone call. My life and everything it it came to a giant fork in the road. Suddenly there wasn't enough air in the room. I didn't have any words to respond with. I don't even remember if I said anything or asked any questions. That was the second time my heart broke while knowing you.

It was a short phone call. I put the phone back in its cradle, picked up the checks I had to copy, and walked into our back room in the office. My hands were shaking but I had not cried yet. My coworker took one look at me and asked what was wrong, and it was telling her in one short sentence that made the flood gates open. My boss sent me home. I was walking up 18th to the metro when I got out my cell phone and started hitting buttons. I called my sisters. I called my best friend. I don't even know if I was consciously choosing names in my address book.

"He's dead. He died."

Over and over, the same words, the same shocked responses, the same disbelief, the same sympathy. Because what can you say? What else is there to say?

It was even sort of nice outside that day, as I was walking. The sun was shining and seemed too bright. People were scooting about with briefcases and heels and suits on their lunch breaks. Everything was so normal and everyone was acting like nothing had happened. It felt like the sort of day where bad things are not supposed to happen, where phone calls at your desk phone should only be about work, where trivial things you were so concerned about an hour ago should still be front and center in that self-absorbed microcosm-ish way. I started calling people because I had no idea what else to do. I was trapped in this alternate world where everything and nothing was as it should be.

People came over to my house that night. It was the first and only time in my almost 4 years of living there that I've ever had that many people in my living room. We made tacos. I spent the better part of an hour shredding a block of cheese into tiny pieces with a knife, carefully, slowly. Tiny little cheese pieces. I didn't know what else to do with myself.

The phone rang and I lost my center completely.

Do you know I still feel that way? If I think about you too much now I don't know what to do with myself. I miss you so much - that light you had, your laughter, your odd sense of humor. You were so smart. I want the world that has you in it. We're all better for it. What happened to that?

I miss you, Wyatt Dean. Not because I think you are suffering... on the contrary I know you are just fine where you are. More than that - you are love, peace, bliss... But I miss you especially because the rest of us have gaping holes in our hearts without you here. I miss you selfishly because I want to see what you would be up to right now - what jobs you would have had, if you were married, where you'd decide to live. 4 years has felt like an eternity.

I just miss you.

Preface to Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"

"This is what you shall do:

Love the earth and sun and the animals,

despise riches,

give alms to every one that asks,

stand up for the stupid and crazy,

devote your income and labor to others,

hate tyrants,

argue not concerning God,

have patience and indulgence toward the people,

take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,

go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,

read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,

re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul;

and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

On Forgiveness

"Widely confused with forgetting or reconciliation, forgiveness is neither. It is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves...To acknowledge that we have been harmed by another but choose to let go of our resentment or wishes for retribution requires a high order of emotional and ethical maturity. It is a way of liberating ourselves from a sense of oppression and a hopeful statement of our capacity to change. If we can relinquish the preoccupations and pseudo-explanations that are rooted in the past, we are free to choose the attitudes with which we confront the present and future.

We are all burdened by memories of injury or rejection or unfairness. Sometimes we hold on to these grievances with a bitter determination that causes us to become preoccupied with the persons or institutions we hold responsible for our unhappiness. We live in a culture in which the sense of being wronged is pervasive. If every misfortune can be blamed on someone else, we are relieved of the difficult task of examining our own contributory behavior, or just accepting the fact that life is and has always been full of adversity. Most of all, by placing responsibility outside ourselves we miss out on the healing knowledge that what happens to us is not nearly as important as the attitude we adopt in response."

(from "Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart," by Gordon Livingston)

On Healing

... to make blossoming possible, we must embrace our losses. We must face the reality of a brokenness of heart that is both personal and of the world. Surprisingly, that is when we discover that the pain is the mantra: the very suffering of the world can be what repeatedly calls us back to the imperative of its healing. If we can persist and sit with the reality, not running from it, a music may eventually be heard. The fetters of destructive control loosen. Life’s dance resurges. And there is joy in spite of everything.
- Alastair McIntosh, Soil and Soul

HoopPath Retreat 2009 (pt. 2)

Another retreat... another soul-shaping 4 days. I was mostly prepared for the emotional aspects of the weekend this year, and any upsurge of pain or bitterness was quickly balanced out by an overwhelming amount of love, gratitude and laughter. As a result, I came home EXHAUSTED this year, but deeply entrenched in a well of vibrant and vivid emotion. To put it best - I LIVED this retreat. I soaked it in, let the flavors settle in on my tongue, I ate well, I slept well, and I took time to breathe as well as dance. I spent wonderful moments with my hoop sisters and brothers - though it is never as much as I would like, and the time we have together moves too quickly at events like this. There always seems to be a million things I didn't say that I remember when I am driving home or sitting here at my desk a few days later.

To explain a bit - The Hoop Path is a hooping instruction-based company located in Carborro, North Carolina. It is run by two individuals, Ann and Baxter. Baxter developed his teaching curriculum after 2-3 years of hooping daily on his own, recovering from a shoulder injury. After hooping for a while, Baxter started noticing that his Depression was lifting. He began having moments and stretches of time where he felt good, whole, and connected to the world he lived in. He began teaching classes that interwove metaphors, life experience, struggle, joy and mindful movement. The hooping community, once catching wind of this sort of teaching, went sort of nuts. It seemed we were all starving for a way to access this particular pearl inside of ourselves - to be nudged just enough to awaken into our true unapologetic states of being, both inside the hoop and out. Baxter serves as a light on my hoop path, a pulse to ground myself in. He has by far been the most influential and empowering instructor and hooper I have ever come into contact with. It is because of Baxter that I can say with confidence, humility, and deep gratitude that "I AM A SPIRITUAL HOOPER". My hoop is my personal doorway to peace, balance and connection to Life. This year was my second Hoop Path retreat, and the third one that has been held. It came at a time where I really feel a blending of my hooping life with my daily work/home/family/friends life, in terms of cultivating that peaceful abandon I feel while moving with my hoop in other areas of my life.

One of the topics discussed this past weekend was appearance and the importance people place upon it. Baxter pointed out his noticing that some hoopers are seemingly too concerned with what other people see and think... that we can get tangled in the web of trying to gain acceptance through other people's eyes and subsequently prohibit ourselves from growth. We worry about tricks, we push through the important steps of learning how to hoop or connecting with our personal rhythm in a vain attempt to master grace too quickly. One of the metaphors used, in terms of being on a path as a hooper and a human being, was the imagery and literal ascension up a mountain. While surely you can just begin to run straight up the side of the rock face and make good ground for a while, it will soon exhaust you. There will come a time where the rock face is too steep, where you suddenly lack the understanding and ability to continue on that straight-to-the-top shortcut. If you slowly circle the mountain, however, and ascend it slowly... you gain a steady momentum. You gain wisdom with each step. Your dance, understanding and awareness comes naturally and organically as you take mindful steps towards belief, ability and grace.

He challenged us to feel without seeing, to dance without hesitation, and to open ourselves to the beauty of authenticity. He pushed us to be present.

You know those moments that come around where you are suddenly hit with a culminating awareness of: "This is EXACTLY where I am supposed to be right now"? Along with feeling as though somehow, both consciously and unconsciously, you have been being prepared for this moment of total understanding for so long... all the prior hints and experiences that added up suddenly are flashing through your brain in total 360 degree focus. The figurative light bulb over your head clicks on, and it's as though your mouth is struck dumb, and all you can utter is something like "oh...wow. WOW." That was what it was like for 4 days for me at this retreat. Continual moments of collective understanding and awe.

Hoop Path Retreat 2009 (pt. 1)

From Hoop Path Retreat 2009

We Have Come To Be Danced

by Jewel Matheison

We have come to be danced
not the pretty dance
not the pretty pretty, pick me, pick me dance
but the claw our way back into the belly
of the sacred, sensual animal dance
the unhinged, unplugged, cat is out of its box dance
the holding the precious moment in the palms
of our hands and feet dance

We have come to be danced
not the jiffy booby, shake your booth for him dance
but the wring the sadness from our skin dance
the blow the chip off our shoulder dance
the slap the apology from our posture dance

We have come to be danced
not the monkey see, monkey do dance
one, two dance like you
one two three, dance like me dance
but the grave robber, tomb stalker
tearing scabs & scars open dance
the rub the rhythm raw against our souls dance

We have come to be danced
not the nice invisible, self conscious shuffle
but the matted hair flying, voodoo mama
shaman shakin ancient bones dance
the strip us from our casings, return our wings
sharpen our claws & tongues dance
the shed dead cells and slip into the luminous skin of love dance

We have come to be danced
not the hold our breath and wallow in the shallow end of the floor dance
but the meeting of the trinity: the body, breath & beat dance
the shout hallelujah from the top of our thighs dance
the mother may I?
yes you may take 10 giant leaps dance
the Olly Olly Oxen Free Free Free dance
the EVERYONE CAN COME TO OUR HEAVEN DANCE

We have come to be danced
where the kingdoms collide
in the cathedral of flesh
to burn back into the light
to unravel, to play, to fly, to pray
to root in skin sanctuary
We have come to be danced

WE HAVE COME

Broken Open

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.