Episode 075 - The Invitation & The Dance, read by Sam & Rebecca, written by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Rebecca: So the podcast episode this week for pleasure central radio is a day late. Maybe a little more than a day late now. But I had, I had a different episode planned for you. And I kept listening back to it and it was slightly depressing. It wasn't quite pleasure central radio material yet, but it's going to be it's coming, I promise.
In the meantime, I wanted to leave you with something that actually does feel like pleasure, at least to me. So these are two poems. Sam read me the first poem called the invitation. And I think it's lovely. So the first snippet here is him reading this poem sharing it with you. And then I was really inspired - after hearing that poem I ended up looking up the author and finding some of her other books that I really appreciated. I bought one, and when it arrived, I started looking through it in this poem really resonated with me sort of as a response to The Invitation.
So I thought this would be lovely. I'm going to share that poem and share a little bit about what I think about it and why it hit me so hard in the feels. And then yeah, if you're inspired, you can go out and check out some of her other books full of poems.
This book, The Dance, has each stanza explained in a new chapter.
So it's very interesting thing to read if you're curious about this concept of living open-heartedly in the world, those are both things that if that resonates with you, I think her stuff will too. So. Uh, here you go.

Here's Sam reading The Invitation.

Sam: The Invitation by Oriah.
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 center of your own sorrow. If you've been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of, for their pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine, or your own without moving to hide it or faded 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 were 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 center 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.

So I really love a lot about this poem. It really seems to cut to the heart of what's important and just the embrace of life as a whole, I think, is particularly pointed in this. It's not some rah, rah cheerleader everything is great. Everything's going to be great kind of thing, but she really talks about just embracing all of these different aspects of life and not shying away from it.
And not glossing over it or trying to hide from it. She really leans into it. And I think that's really cool. Rebecca reading The Dance
Rebecca: What if the question is not "why am I so infrequently the person I really want to be?" but "why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?"
The Dance
I have sent you my invitation, the note inscribed on the Palm of my hand, by the fire of living. Don't jump up and shout, "Yes, this is what I want! Let's do it!"
Just stand up quietly.
And dance with me.
Show me how you follow your deepest desires, spiraling down into the ache within the ache. And I will show you how I reach inward, and open outward to feel the kiss of the Mystery, sweet lips on my own every day.
Don't tell me you want to hold the whole world in your heart.
Show me how you turn away from making another wrong without abandoning yourself when you are hurt and afraid of being unloved.
Tell me a story of who you are and see who I am in the stories I am living. And together, we will remember that each of us always has a choice.
Don't tell me how wonderful things will be ... someday.
Show me you can risk being completely at peace, truly okay with the way things are right now in this moment.
And again in the next and the next. And the next.
I have heard enough warrior stories of heroic daring.
Tell me how you crumble when you hit the wall, the place you cannot go beyond by the strength of your own will.
What carries you to the other side of that wall, to the fragile beauty of your own humanness?
And after we have shown each other, how we have set and kept the clear, healthy boundaries that help us live side-by-side with each other, let us risk remembering that we never stop silently loving those we once loved out loud.
Take me to the places on the earth that teach you how to dance. The places where you can risk letting the world break your heart, and I will take you to the places where the earth beneath my feet and the stars overhead and make my heart whole again and again.
Show me how you take care of business without letting business determine who you are.
When the children are fed, but still the voices within and around us shout that soul's desires have too high a price, let us remind each other that this is never about the money.
Show me how you offer to your people and the world the stories and the songs you want our children's children to remember.
And I will show you how I struggle, not to change the world, but to love it. Sit beside me in long moments of shared solitude, knowing both our absolute aloneness and our undeniable belonging.
Dance with me in the silence and in the sound of small daily words, holding neither against me at the end of the day.
And when the sound of all of the declarations of our sincerest intentions has died away on the wind, dance with me in the infinite pause before the next great inhale of the breath that is breathing us all into being, not the emptiness from the outside or from within.
Don't say yes. Just take my hand
and dance with me.

My take on The Dance There's a few things that I really love about this poem. The first being that it's about dance. I love dance, particularly partner dance. And it feels to me like what she's describing in here is that moving together with each other to someplace that you both want to be and not holding on to each other - depending, over depending, I guess, codepending on each other. And feeling that freedom to move and to be wherever you want to be, wherever you need to be. yeah, it's a really lovely. I love the concept and lovely idea.
To me, it sounds like all of these "don't tell me this, show me that" is a call to put your money where your mouth is, to be impeccable in your word. You know, if you say you're going to do something, then do it. And I'm not going to believe you until I see that you're doing it, sort of thing. And in one way, that is really challenging and almost has a little bit of an attitude, but the more I hear it the more, I think this is not really having an attitude as much as it is a call to be your best self, right? A call to actually live your values and what matters to you and do it in a way that you're not asking me to believe you - " You know me by the stories that I'm living, and I know you by the stories that you're living."
And that to me is really cool. That relates back to what I talked about on the acro yoga episode, "True Love Requires True Sight." unless you can really see the essence of somebody - and we can't really, I mean, we can only guess at the essence of somebody but the clearer we get at looking at the world without so many reflections popping back at us and distracting us, the easier it becomes to see the reality of the person.
And when we can see more and more of the reality of who that person is, who they're being , what they care about in the world, how they live, what matters to them... then an immense amount of respect and also, I think love develops out of that. Whether or not, it's romantic love. I tend to love the people that I can see moving about their lives in ways that matter to them - people living through their values.
Dancing, living with your values, being able to move through the world as things are changing and maintaining your balance. To me, that's this poem. That's why it matters and that's why I have been using it as sort of a gauge or a guide post for my own behaviour. Where does what I am doing today fit into this poem?
Anyway, that's what I think about this. And the other piece was just getting to have this literary dance with Sam, We've always had an interesting relationship like that and that we will share music or songs or stories or books or poetry with each other, and in a way it's like that takes our conversation with each other deeper because now we have a new set of vocabulary to converse with. And so the next time we talk , having that shared basis of knowledge, we can then refer back to those things and see each other deeper, know each other deeper. But also just have a better understanding of the world and life in general.
It's a nice cleaning for the lens, the perspective, that we are each looking out at the rest of the world through.
My invitation to the community
And hey, if you appreciated this episode and you like the idea of having a literary friendship, where you can share back and forth with somebody, I am building an online community. This is partially sparked out of my experience of having COVID and being isolated on my own for 10 days. I knew that I needed to find a way to connect with people.
And so I did what computer geeks do when they don't know something: I Googled it!
And I ended up researching a bunch of different things, finding a platform I really liked, hopping into it and, within, I don't know, four or five days I made six or seven real life connections. People that I'm going to have on the podcast. People that are super interesting and excited to be doing something in the world.
It was a really cool experience.
So because of that, I've decided I'm going to create something similar for the podcast. So. If you're a fan of pleasure central radio, and if you'd like to connect with me and explore this new project that I'm creating, I would love to have you come and check it out.
So the purpose for this community is to bring together men and women who want to normalize conversation about all manner of ethical pleasure in order to step up our partnership skills while deepening our understanding and compassion of others through sharing stories of meaningful pleasure, so that we can each live the bliss of an emotionally honest life through communicating what matters most to the people who matter most, and build a life full of sustainable fulfilling relationships that we can each be deeply proud of.
If that sounds like fun, if you would like to come and be a beta tester and check this community out, if you're excited and get all Twittery and, uh, jittery by hearing that purpose, then I would love to meet you.
Click on the link in the show notes, come say hello. And I can't wait to see what you add.