The Invitational Identity

quickshooting

 The Art and Practice 

of Shaping a Beautiful Mind

Quite often we feel that inner horizon beneath which our sense of surety lies, not as an invitation, but as a barrier of discomfort and resistance. Beneath that resistance is an urgency that threatens to break apart our quotidian, everyday and sometimes rather boring life on the surface.

We human beings have always had to live our lives amidst the difficulties, griefs, and foolishness of the world, and still find a place to step onto, and a place to step from, at all the crucial thresholds of our lives. 

Quite often the step we have to make is hidden from us: what is inviting us – and what we are inviting towards ourselves – is not yet illuminated. In that hidden step, and in our hearts and minds as we take it, lies the beginning of an understanding of the mystery of faith: the understanding that we somehow belong to enormous horizons in our lives that are calling us but that we have not yet reached. Many of those horizons will only be reached through difficulty and loss.

Every day and every moment has its own invitations, some of them absolute shocks to the system, but often bring new perspectives and new appreciations if we are big enough and generous enough to meet them. Who knows what lies ahead for all of us in this coming year? 

All of us will have our equal measures of light and shade. 

Some of us will pass through very difficult depths of shadow and challenge. 

One thing is sure; the ability to invite the right kind of help for ourselves as we move through our traumas and triumphs, our joys and our unexpected victories, becomes essential.

To begin with, there is a very real sense of astonishment, a sense of walking with the ones we have lost and, most especially, walking with your own grief while also letting go. The whole experience creates another form of intimacy with the person you have lost, even as you are giving them away.

Then come periods, after a few years perhaps, when you may not think of them for long stretches at a time. But in difficult times in your life, you may find yourself returning to their side and asking for their help. Recently, I went through a most extraordinarily painful but necessary time and found myself asking for my mother’s help in a very powerful way.

Who knows who we are asking for help—whether we are asking for help from an actual spirit who knows what we are inviting in, or whether we are inviting in that profound part of them that still lives in us, and always will, because they were such a foundational part of our lives. Almost always, as the years go by, there occurs a kind of blurring between what you think is other than you, and what you think is you.

We are all waking into a new life, every day of our life and I want to work with the theme of the invitational identity: what you bring towards yourself, but also, what quite scarily at times, is inviting you. Very often the invitation is one toward a more courageous centre and foundation inside yourself than the not so courageous part of you that holds the daily conversation of your life.

Quite often, whether we can remember a dream or not, there is a kind of physical tonality that we wake up with in the morning – something that invites us into a deeper way of being in the world. It is more than worthwhile, it is a form of treasure – to stay with those moments. There are times, of course, when you cannot. If you have young children running into your bedroom, bouncing on the bed, hungry and ready for the day, you do not have time for considering a dream. There are seasons of life in which you do not have the luxury to linger in the revelations that float up like cargo from the deep river of rest inside you. But if you do have the time, it is a very powerful way to open the day to something both new and renewing itself inside you.

I wrote the poem "What to Remember When Waking" to celebrate that opening, but also to remind myself of the discipline necessary to stay with the revelation no matter how opaque it might be. As a way of remembering I have often woken up and recited this piece to myself immediately.

Sometimes the imagery of our dream life – or, as I say, that very physical body tonality we wake up with in the morning – can be so uncomfortable or so frightening that we will not turn our face towards it. We refuse to investigate it. We are relieved instead to get up to our coffee, to go through the motions of making our breakfast, of beginning the day, and placing ourselves back into a more comfortable environment full of our familiar motions. But there is a deep practice in turning your face towards whatever has been given to you in the night, whatever difficulties you are being handed, regarding interpretation...

David Whyte