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This page currently has Oriah's newsletters from Sept. 2007, March 2007, Spring 2006, Spring 2005 and August 2001 newsletters. As well, there is an interview she did for Thorson's website. |
September 2007 The News In July Jeff and I went up to a wonderful place, Kukagami Lodge, in northern Ontario. The only guests at the small off-the-grid lodge, we spent our days canoeing and reading and listening to the loons at this wilderness retreat. Then, on the third day, after doing my morning prayers and meditation, I sat with my journal and wrote out an outline for a novel. A novel, just like that! And since then I have been dreaming- writing- the story of Isabel, a twenty-seven year old philosophy student who has been drawn into the workings of a dreamers' wheel, a group of people dedicated to and trained in the ancient shamanic practice of lucid dreaming together to hold a place for the co-creation of a new dream of the people, a dream of wholeness that will help guide human beings through the current and impending ecological crisis. Of course, Isabel, as a rational modern woman is skeptical, and there are other forces at work- those who oppose the work of the dreamers and are willing to go to great lengths to stop Isabel from joining the wheel. . . . . You get the idea. The most surprising thing about writing fiction has been how much fun I am having. Most days I am anxious to get to it just to see what happens and where Isabel's adventure will take her. I am about one third of the way through the rough draft (and I can see that fiction will require many rewrites) and I plan to just keep going. I still don't know if I will return to doing any public speaking or workshop facilitation, but I trust these things will become clear as the year unfolds. In the meantime, I am dreaming/writing the story of Isabel and the dreamweavers. I want to thank those of you who have been in touch via snail mail and email during this time of silence and solitude. It has been lovely to be reminded that I remain, of course, deeply connected to the world. If you receive this newsletter more than once please forgive me and know I am spending my time finding out how Isabel escapes from the bookstore basement where she has been trapped instead of updating and integrating my mailing list. Below is a brief reflection I wanted to share with you. May the adventure continue. Blessings, Oriah
Gratitude for Gunfire Lately, I've been thinking about how much life's little difficulties help me show up for and appreciate my life. This has occurred to me as I find myself giving thanks in the morning for the quiet where I live, for the whisper of the wind in the pines, the song of birds calling the sun up, and for the police who may or may not choose today for target practice in the quarry about a mile from our home. That's right- the police have a rifle range within easy listening distance of our wonderful home in the woods. When we first moved here we were told the officers used the range periodically and no more than once a week for short periods of time. Home on sabbatical it became apparent that the shooting is sometimes more frequent and seemingly unpredictable. I was devastated. I seethed silently, I fumed vocally, I threatened to pack up our belongings and find a new place to live. After a few weeks of this, I called the police training facility and asked about the shooting. The lovely man in charge of the schedule has since done his best to limit the shooting, arrange it at times when it is least disruptive and let me know when it is going to happen. His consideration has made all the difference in the world. With my anxiety about living in the midst of never-ending gunfire dissipated, I discovered something else: knowing there would be target practice Thursday, I found myself really noticing and sinking into the quiet on other days whether I was doing my morning practice, pulling weeds in the garden, or washing the kitchen floor. uddenly, I began to really savor the silence, knowing that it- like everything else- would pass. That's when I started including the officers who use the firing range in my prayers of gratitude. And I mean it! Their noise has helped me fully receive and appreciate the gift of the quiet that surrounds me most of the time. I'm not just making virtue out of necessity. I really taste the quiet in a new way when I know there will be times when it is not available. This got me thinking about how hard it is to be mindful of and really appreciate the things that are more or less a constant in our lives, The times when things don't match my preferences can be teachers of deep gratitude. There's nothing like illness to make me appreciate being healthy, insomnia to make a good night's sleep feel like a gift, a loved one's absence to make me think fondly of the very idiosyncrasies that previously drove me a little crazy. I'm not suggesting that we have to go out and look for or create lack in order to be grateful for what we have. Change is constant. and so there will be an ebb and flow of those things we experience as both desirable and undesirable. Nor am I saying that we should never take action to change conditions. When I'm ill I go to bed and take the herbs that will help me recover. Someday we may move, and if we do, it may in part be because we want to be away from the firing range. What I am saying is that instead of seeing the things that are not the way I would like them to be (like folks shooting guns where I can hear them) as nothing but barriers to my peace and happiness, I can recognize how they help me deepen my gratitude for my life. Thinking about how this works with external conditions in our lives I started to appreciate how it works with internal states. Moments of agitation and fear really heighten my awareness and appreciation for moments of deep peace and fearlessness, so how could I not be grateful for them all- the agitation, the fear, the peace and the fearlessness- as they come and go? Remembering what matters, things I thought I could never forget, is sweet at least in part because it ends, for a time, the pain of forgetfulness. And the remembering is savored fully because, being human, I know forgetfulness will return. Really knowing that all conditions, internal and external, shall pass, helps me show up fully for this moment with curiosity and gratitude for whatever it has to offer. Including the conditions that do not line up with my preferences in my expressions of gratitude I am more able to love what is and then, hopefully, take action from a place of mindful appreciation instead of fear. So here's my thanks to the Ontario Provincial Police for their target practice in my area, and for all the other things that sometimes feel like obstacles but offer me a chance to live with a deeper sense of gratitude. Oriah
Dear friends, As of March 9, I will be halfway through my planned three-year sabbatical (Sept. '06 to Sept. '09), mid-way through the year set aside for stillness. I want to take a moment to let you know how things are going, but it feels difficult to speak or write without falling into old cadences that belong to who I was but am no longer. I do not yet know how to allow the words to flow from the emptiness, from the sacred spaciousness that I am discovering is the only constant in this being alive. So this may be, of necessity, a bit rambling and disjointed. Thoughts about longing come, but they are new, embryonic and only partly formed. I have only just recognized in myself a deep and defensive aversion to wanting, a life-time strategy of attachment to not-wanting developed in the hopes of preserving the illusion of an wholly independent (and therefore hopefully safe) self. The cost of this protective strategy- a loss of ability to really receive all that is offered in each moment- is too high, but even knowing this I am occasionally, for moments, plunged into old terrors as an illusion that offered so much comfort for so long is shattered. Each day is mercurial, nothing like the one before it. Some days are dull and others are filled with vivid color. Some moments are calm, filled with infinite peace, and others are agitated and overwhelming. Change is the only constant. What can I tell you that is for certain? That I am healthy today. That even as my menopausal body surprises me with signs of aging that seem to belong to someone else, I feel a vitality I have not felt since I was a child. That I am grateful to be alive, to have this time and space in which to find the stillness and wander away into distraction and return to the stillness, over and over again. That I love this earth. That each new day I am finding my way back to the wilderness within that sustains life and passion. That I am slowly replacing grasping expectations with soft hopes, determined resolutions with constant prayer. I am reminded of lines from Dante's La Commedia Divina, sometimes translated: In the middle of the road of my life I will tell you the truth: this being still, this choosing to face each day without agenda or plan, waiting to see where the impulse to move- God's soft whisper from deep within- will take me, this staying with not-knowing what will come next has been one of the most challenging and rewarding times in my life. I sleep when I need to sleep for as long as my body needs rest. I take all the time I need and want for daily prayer, meditation, writing in my journal, yoga, reading, snowshoeing in the deep snow and sitting by the wood stove watching the fire. Most days, by the time I have taken these inward journeys it's time to prepare dinner. I stay in touch with close friends but often I see no one but Jeff when he returns from work at the end of the day. I watch the chickadees, junkos, scarlet cardinal and squawking blue jays at the birdfeeder. I study the tracks in the snow drifts around the house and in the woods, seeing there the stories of deer, coyotes and a multitude of bunnies. I don't want to give you the impression that I am living in a bubble, unaware of the larger world. We don't have television and our internet connection is of the slower-than-molasses-dial-up variety, so input comes pretty exclusively and selectively from books, CBC radio and occasional DVD rentals. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth has inspired Jeff and I to educate ourselves about taking our home off the grid with renewable energy and reducing our overall energy needs. Watching the blatant spiritual materialism of The Secret (a movie that takes the well-known truth that your mind can have a profound influence over many situations and twists it into the promise that your mind has complete control over all situations!) was discouraging. Hearing about the growing popularity of this movie's message to focus on ego control and unquestioning consumerism, I feel a great sadness. On the other hand, Andrew Harvey's recorded presentation on the transformational power of the sacred feminine as the dark mother offers me a way of seeing my journey during this time, provides courage for the fires that reveal my shadow and sweep away my illusions, gives hope for rebirthing individually and collectively into new ways of being in and with the world. Having stepped away from being in the world as writer/teacher/public speaker, I feel myself in the transformational arms of this divine feminine. Often I feel I am disappearing. On a good day I am filled with excitement and curiosity to see what will remain when all I thought I was is consciously recognized as merely thought. And I write in my journal: How many levels of letting go are there? How many layers of giving up this war with reality, surrendering the compulsive daily movement meant to reassure ourselves that we are doing something that will "make a difference." I have dropped down below surface layers of hanging on and pulling away, but I am still miles from the bedrock of being. But ideas of time and distance do not really apply here. Willingness and grace melt ceaseless struggle in an instant. The gift of sweet surrender meets all resistance like sunlight dissolving a whisp of cloud in the clear blue sky. And it is a gift, this surrendering, not something any "I" can achieve or make happen, a generosity, a continuous flowing toward me whether I am mindful or forgetting, at my best or my worst or- more often- somewhere in between. May you be well and happy. May we find an internally and externally sustainable way of living together on this green earth. Oriah I am on sabbatical. Last September, after the blessings and challenges of a busy six years of writing and being on the road, I sat down. Then, assisted by a deep weariness and a series of illnesses, I lay down. A recent infection landed me in bed for twelve weeks when I wasn’t visiting the hospital for re-hydrating IV’s. For the first time in my life I was too sick to read. It was not fun. Although I find myself reading far less than I ever have, I did pick up a book that has also helped: The Dark Night Of The Soul by Gerald May. It explores the writings of Christian mystics John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. While the phrase “dark night of the soul” is often associated with difficult times brought about by misfortune or tragedy, the original phrase, noche oscura, implies only that what is to come next cannot be seen. This time of not-knowing, this dark night, brings the possibility of transformation, of liberation from the attachment to having things “my way.” It holds, as May writes, the gift of knowing that we are not as much in control of life as we’d like to be. As the busyness in my life falls away so too does my attachment to the identities I have had in the world. In this too I have been given assistance. Although I didn’t plan to use my medicine name Mountain Dreamer outside of ceremony, because the poem “The Invitation” was originally sent to former students that was the name it bore. Ironically, having gotten used to the raised eyebrows and skeptical questions of those who understandably wonder if a “Mountain Dreamer” might be a bit flakey, Harper San Francisco recently asked me if I would be willing to have the new paperback editions of The Invitation, The Dance and The Call coming out in April of 2006, released simply under the name Oriah. They are interested in making the stories and meditations in the books available to a wider audience. While I share this hope, I agreed to the request mostly because it seems to be consistent with changes that are encouraging me to be less attached to old ways of seeing and being seen. So I rest in the noche oscura. Most days my prayer is, “I am listening.” And I do. I listen as I make breakfast, wash the kitchen floor or sit in front of the woodstove. I am curious and sometimes a little nervous about how things will unfold. But my predominant feeling is one of surprise at my growing conviction, despite the opinion of some that what I am doing (or not-doing) is “crazy” and despite the lack of any “objective” proof, that I am held and guided in this process by the Sacred Mystery. I guess you could call this faith. Borrowing the phrase, “ray of darkness,” that Gerald May credits to the sixth century mystic known as Dionysius, I recently wrote: A ray of darkness has entered my life. Is this how a tree lives? Just this: I am living like a tree.
Oriah The twelve writing exercises that Oriah wrote after the publication of her book on creative work, What We Ache For, are available on this website. Just click on “Creative Writing Exercises.” FUTURE NEWSLETTERS: Available APRIL 25, 2006: new paperback editions of THE INVITATION, THE DANCE and THE CALL from Harper San Francisco.
Spring 2005 As many of you know I decided to take an indefinite sabbatical from facilitating workshops and speaking at conferences as of September 2004. So how's the sabbatical going? Well, Jeff and I decided last fall to put a small addition on our house. This led to the discovery that we needed a new septic system. As carpenters, contractors, excavators, and electricans came and went daily for weeks I decided to paint all the rooms of the house- something I'd wanted to do since we moved here two years ago. All this while completing the rewrites on a new book, What We Ache For . Maybe a workaholic shouldn't try to take a sabbatical! It has been good to be home and I am not giving up on slowing down and creating more spacious stillness in my life. Although you can see by the attached calendar that I will be venturing forth and offering talks as part of a spring book tour, I will not be planning or facilitating workshops or retreats for the foreseeable future, as I wait to see what unfolds next in my life. What We Ache For is about that aspect of life which consistently offers me a strange joy and deep contentment: creative work. It offers reflections on and practical ways to cultivate creative expression in your life. Human beings are by our essential nature co-creators of meaning. Creative expression is one of the ways we grapple with ideas and the struggles of daily life. We have within us a deep impulse- an ache- to find and point to the truth, to create beauty and connections from the details of our lives by making images, movements and music, poems and stories and songs. Our creativity, spirituality and sexuality are expressions of our individual soul, mirrors of the divine lived through a particular human life. What We Ache For is about doing our creative work without separating it from our experience of both the sacred and the sensual. And it's about having fun while we are doing it. Doing creative work can bring us great joy even as it enables us to deepen our lives and live more fully awake. In a culture where spirituality and sexuality are often burdened by histories of dogma, division and a desperate need to be "right" it seems to me that creative expression offers us a way to quietly slip around our habitual ways of seeing and, if only for a moment, disengage from the ego's preoccupation with the past and worries for the future. When I write I never feel I should be doing something else. Ever. I am present. When I look at the suggestions for doing more and deeper creative work that I have offered in this new book - including the necessary and paradoxical combination of a focused intent and a willingness to surrender to the process itself- I see guidelines for living with joy. Strangely I often find it easier to follow these guidelines when I am doing creative work than when I am dealing with septic systems, answering emails or interacting with friends and family. Learning how to do creative work we are offered a template for allowing the soul to unfold, for becoming who we are and for offering something life-sustaining to this world. I do hope you can come out to one of the events to hear some poetry, and share in some meditation, conversation and creative expression. May you be faithful to the creative work that calls you, Oriah Resources for Creative Writing: • Beginning in April 2005, for one year I will post on my web site a monthly journal page of personal reflections and writing. Hopefully it will help get your creative juices flowing. Just download the pdf file here and start writing. My dear friend and webmaster, Peter Marmorek, has set up an on-line writers' community that uses some of the ideas presented in What We Ache For. To see if it might be a fit for you and to check out the details go to www.writerscroft.com
Dear Friends, Recently the host of a radio program asked me to consider how I would answer the question, "What is wellness?" I’ve been contemplating the question ever since, rolling it around in my mind like a smooth beach stone you carry in your pocket, getting to know it by touch instead of sight alone, seeking a different perspective. I keep thinking about the word itself- wellness- the quality of being well. I’ve played with the idea of wells- the deep holes we dig into the earth that provide us with life-giving moisture, something that gives us access to, contains and encourages the flow of that which is essential for life. There was a time when I would have defined wellness pretty exclusively in terms of physical health and emotional balance. Today, I would evaluate and define my wellness by the degree to which I am experiencing three things that certainly impact my physical health and emotional balance but are not synonymous with them. First, wellness is a deep connection to myself, to both my essentially compassionate nature and my very human fears and needs of the moment. It is tasting the truth of who and what I am. Wellness is also the experience of the Mystery, that which is larger than myself and yet embodied within my essential nature and all that is. It is knowing the presence of that to which I belong, the Beloved. And wellness is a willingness to let myself unfold in the world, to offer who and what I am in this moment- whether through my work of writing and speaking, or simply by being fully present with the guy who has just come to fix my hot water heater and is telling me about his newborn son. When I am well I am willing in my own small way to love the world as it is right now. Wellness is what feeds us, wakes us up, and saturates our days with the juice of co-creating meaning in our lives and our world. And so, I focus my practice- my daily prayers and meditation- on connecting deeply to the Mystery, the world and myself. Often my wellness, my connection, is predicated on surrender- surrender to my essential nature, to the sacred presence that is larger than all of it, and to the task of loving the world. I have to let go of all the things I think I must do or be to let the connection that sustains me and is always there, surface. Not always easy for a recovering perfectionist and workaholic but my hunger for the passion and peace it brings is increasingly larger than my fear of letting go. One of the ways I feed this hunger and find my inherent connectedness is by sharing stories through my writing and speaking. The current speaking schedule is included here, and The Dance is now on bookshelves. The folks at Isabella have produced a beautiful poster of the prose-poem The Invitation that can be ordered on line. May we find our way to connection. May we be well. Dance In Beauty, Oriah Mountain Dreamer
Excerpts from An Interview with Thorson's, Oriah's publisher in Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa. Questions and Answers: Oriah Mountain Dreamer In Chapter 1 of The Dance you mention that you wish you'd had the insight from the Grandmother before you'd gone through the whole process of seven chapters. How did your writing, your ideas, and insight change after the Grandmother's visit to you in your dream? How has your life or your sense of your life changed since then? Well, the Grandmother in the dream told me I was headed in the wrong direction. She said, "The question is not why are you so infrequently the people you really want to be but why do you so infrequently want to be the people you really are." And then she answered the question saying, "Because you have no faith that who you are is enough." And she continued, "But it is. Your true nature as human beings is compassionate, and this essential nature makes you capable of being intimately and fully present. Who you really are is enough." I have doubted, questioned and quibbled with this insight a thousand times since that night but the truth is that I knew when she said it that it was true and I also knew that it would change everything- what I was writing in the book, how I lived my life and what I had to offer to others. If who we are is essentially flawed then the task is to change, to transform our essential nature. But if who we essentially are is enough, our task is to unfold, to become who we are. Of course, you cannot help but ask- if my essential nature is this wonderful compassion than how come I behave so badly some of the time? The Dance is my exploration of some of the times when my actions are not directed by this essential compassionate nature. It is an examination of how we can remember who and what we really are even when we are frightened. If The Invitation was a declaration of intent, The Dance is about how to live this intent in a human life. The Invitation has been such a phenomenon, has its success changed your life at all? Did it bring any unwanted consequences? The success of The Invitation has brought change, and change- even when it is for the better in many ways- takes some adjustment. It is lovely not having to figure out how to hustle up the money for my son's unexpected school trip, or the increase in the phone company's rates. It has given me the opportunity to focus on writing and then, as the books come out, to travel and speak to many people. All this is good and I feel very blessed. The hard part is really what is always hard- staying in touch with my deepest self and maintaining my connection with that which is larger than myself in the midst of a busy life. It's not so much that my life is busier but the form of the busyness has changed and with new situations- like being on the road- I have to have new strategies for making sure I carve out enough silence, enough time alone to do my daily practises and stay deeply connected to who I am. I am learning now to do this in the midst of a changing life. What do you hope people will get from reading The Dance and how do you hope it will have made an impact? When I write a book my first prayer is that it do no harm, and I feel that in writing The Dance I came very close to writing a book that could have done harm. Before the Grandmother's insight and direction I was at risk of writing- out of the sincerest good intentions- yet another book that would say to us all, "This is our problem. This is what is wrong with each of us. This is what we need to change in order to live our soul's intentions." I don't think the world needs another book urging us to move faster, try harder, change more. I know I don't. I hope that reading The Dance will give others a sense of their inherent nature as compassion, will give us all a sense that who and what we really are is truly enough. I also hope it will help us pay attention to how we lose this sense of ourselves and our connection with that which is larger than ourselves so we can consciously cultivate remembering who and what we are. I hope The Dance will be one of the many places where we feel what the Sufi poet Hafiz calls the "encouragement of light" that helps us unfold and be all we truly and essentially are. What are the origins of your beautiful name? Oriah was given to me by the Grandmothers in the dream many years ago when I was very ill. It means, amongst other things, She Who Belongs to God. Mountain Dreamer is my medicine name. It was given to me by a Native American shaman with whom I apprenticed. He told me when he gave it to me that it meant, "one who likes to find and push the edge." I have some ambivalence about using this name in my writing and my speaking and I admit to being as prejudiced as the next person. When someone comes up and introduces themselves as Ophelia Morning Gloria I think, "Flaky!" which is pretty cheeky for a woman who goes around using Oriah Mountain Dreamer. In my daily life I use my family name, generally introducing myself as Oriah House. In many interviews the first thing the interviewer says is, "Oriah Mountain Dreamer's not your real name is it?" to which I reply, "Well, it's my real name alright. It's just not my birth name." The truth is that there are many cultures where the birth name is considered a temporary and secondary name used for convenience until more can be seen and known about the person's nature, gifts and role in the world. In spiritual communities- for example, convents- new names are taken to indicate a major life change, or they are given as a guide, something to challenge the person to be all they essentially are. So, Oriah Mountain Dreamer it is. Do you have any frustrations with the concept or term 'New Age' and its philosophy? How do you see yourself within the 'New Age' framework? I would use the term "New Age" in two very different ways. The first is a description for the wide range of spiritual inquiry that has taken place outside the traditional mosques, churches and synagogues over the last twenty-five years. As an umbrella term for this search for spirituality outside the mainstream western religious traditions it applies to everything from Buddhist meditation to crystal healing, from Sufiism to angel communications, from shamanism to channeling. Of course many of these things are not "new" at all but part of ancient traditions. I would put myself and my own seeking within this community of those seeking their own spirituality, although there are aspects of some of these methods I am clearly more comfortable with than others. The other way I would use this term is to define a more narrow set of beliefs that have come out of all this exploration- a set of beliefs that I would call New Age fundamentalism. They include things like- everything that happens, had to happen and happened because you needed it for your spiritual development; or you create every aspect of your own reality all of the time. These are beliefs I do not share and when they are presented as The Truth I become very uncomfortable. They offer simply answers for complex problems. I do not think we can know with certainty why many things happen in our lives, although I do think we always have a choice about how to respond and we can learn something- cultivate meaning- from all that does happen. I feel the task is to keep our hearts open, to show up for all of life, without knowing with certainty why everything that happens, happens. And where will your next writing journey take you? Can you let us into any secrets about the next book? I always knew that this would be a trilogy. Shortly after finishing the manuscript for The Dance I had a dream where I received the title of the next book, The Call. I have had glimpses of where this next one will take me in my writing and my life- since I tend to live these things in order to write them- but they are just glimpses at this point. I do know that it is about our place in the bigger picture, our response to the world's need, and our ability to hear and heed and go home to that which is larger than ourselves. Site design by Peter Marmorek |