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What We Ache For: an interview with Oriah Mountain Dreamer by Connie Hill

Oriah Mountain Dreamer is a visionary teacher and author of the best selling The Invitation, as well as The Dance and The Call. Her latest book, What We Ache For, due out in April is about the creative process. She gives speeches and leads workshops, ceremonies and retreats throughout the United States and Canada.

CH: You turned 50 in September. How do you relate that to the quote on the front of your book The Dance: “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 that I really am?”

O: It’s an interesting thing. People said to me that 40 was big but it wasn’t for me. At 50 the sense of your own body aging is much greater than at 40. At 50 there are a lot of questions for me about how much I want to go with it gracefully and how much I want to fight it. A friend of mine went to a financial seminar on the empowerment of women. The first hour was taken up by a man who talked about plastic surgery. My friend was speechless. Finally, someone got up and said she was really disturbed by the talk and that it was not what she had come for. It’s an interesting process between discussions of plastic surgery, hormone replacement and anti depressants. We’re all puzzled about what is happening and to what degree is it unnecessary to suffer and to what degree is it fertile ground, even though it is not easy, to learn something from?

I was doing my yoga this morning and thinking that for me the thing around weight gain is that it doesn't feel like my body. I’m so identified with my 35 year old body and that’s not the body I have anymore. It’s an interesting process and there aren't really easy answers.

CH: At the beginning of What We Ache For you talk about stopping going out on the road. I was really surprised when I heard you were available for talks with this new book. Did you change your mind?

O: I had always said I’d do the book tour. I feel an obligation to Harper San Francisco. Also, it helps me meet readers and I love to support independent book stores. They sell my books.

CH: I’m glad to hear you talk about the independent book stores.

O: I give my little speech about that every time I go out on the road. I first learned about the impact when I did the Oprah show for The Invitation. I was excited and told a friend who owns a little independent store in Toronto it should be good for her business. She said it was really bad for independents because the sales spike up, the chains buy box loads of the book and slap a 40% off sticker on the books. And she couldn’t compete with that. I have an obligation when I go places to tell people “You love what your small independent book stores know about books and the selections they make. Don’t abandon them when they have sold a book to the point where it becomes a best seller. Don’t go and buy the book at a chain for 30 or 40% off. You’re doing the independents in.”

My local book store knows me. I ask what’s good to read in fiction and they hand me three books. I trust what they give me and I’ve never been steered wrong. I get things I would never have heard of and that’s why I go there.

CH: Can you tell me about how The Invitation came about?

O: It’s based on a writing exercise from David Whyte based on a poem of his. I used the writing exercise over and over again because I found this repetition of “It doesn’t interest me, what I really want to know...” brought things deeper whether I was doing a meditation or a prayer.

I had come home from a party and I was frustrated with the superficial social interaction. I sat down and started to write. I happened to be sending out a newsletter the next day to some people who had come to do some studying with me and I sent it to them. I was on an old, slow computer and had no idea about the life of this poem. It traveled all around the world. And continues to do so. I hear from people every week who have just discovered the poem or the book.

CH: In What We ache For I was drawn to the chapter on beginnings. You talked about the role of resistance in beginnings. I find that I have that with each of the interviews I do.

O: You can see it with interviews. But also, when one is writing a book every day that same things happens and you encounter resistance every day. You can get pissed off because it went so well yesterday. You can understand it to death, but in some ways you just have to find a way through it. A lot of What We Ache For is about beginnings, not just the chapter on beginnings. In many ways creative work is about beginning again and again at every stage and how you do that. It’s about being willing to come to it with a kind of beginners mind each time, which is critical.  

This book is really about a particular kind of creativity that interests me. What interests me is the kind of creative work where you combine this odd combination of discipline and surrender. You focus because you have to have somewhere to start and then you let go of what you thought it was going to be. But you have to have thought it was going to be something to get started. Then you have to continually let go and let it be what it is and then be open to the surprises that come from what you learn.

That’s the creativity that really interests me. That open ended process of inquiry where I’m changed by it. It’s what I love about it and it’s also the source of some of that resistance because I don’t know where it’s going to go or what it’s going to require of me.

CH: Thank you Oriah for taking the time for this interview.

Connie Hill works at New Renaissance Bookshop and is a local astrologer. She can be reached at 503-542-4330 ext. 1287 or gmnite@yahoo.com.