questions and coincidences

Last week a post from Mind Sieve quoted a line of a poem by Oriah Mountaindreamer. The name didn’t ring any bells, and the quote only nudged me slightly to respond. I shrugged it off, but I've been thinking about it ever since. I won't be writing about it tonight though, still thinking, but here's the quote:

"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?'"

Thursday morning we had a video at work of a speaker from last summer’s National Hospice convention, Naomi Tutu. I saw her and enjoyed her presentation last summer in New Mexico, but hadn’t remembered how she began it. She quoted a long poem from, coincidentally, Oriah Mountaindreamer, who Naomi said she thought at first was a native American, not a blond Canadian. Several people commented on the power of the poem, and I was happy I had the name and the link right at hand to give them. Her poem, The Invitation, is printed on her homepage at oriahmountaindreamer.com.

Isn’t it strange how we can hear something new and then immediately have it crop up again somewhere else? Sure, maybe it’s because we are awake to the sound of the name and recognize it again, but not always.

When I went to her site, http://www.oriahmountaindreamer.com/creative.html, I found a section called Creative Writing Exercises. The page begins with the title What We Ache For, the name of one of her books..

The book I began reading last night, Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, begins with the story of how he happened to write it. A young man, Fred, was interviewing him and was obviously uninterested in the job. As they talked, Henri asked him what he really wanted to do, which was write a novel. Anything you really want to do, you can, Henri told him, or words to that effect. You clear off from your calendar the things that are in the way, and you get started. Henri even made it possible for the young man to quit his job and come to be an artist in residence so he could write.

Fred never did finish the novel, but other things came from the choice that were invaluable. Henri began to hear of the longing that Fred, a Jew, and other friends of his had, a yearning for meaning and spirituality in their lives. Fred asked him to write a book for them, not for religious people but for secular people. And he did so.

Oriah asks: “How would you complete the phrase: I never feel I should be doing anything else when I am…?”

How would you complete that phrase?