The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
Written and Narrated By: Frank Ostaseski
Length: 12 hrs and 16 mins
Beauty beyond compare; simply gorgeous
I took a virtual Grief and Creativity workshop several months ago where we participants were asked to trace our left hand and fill it in: This was Life before Grief from the death of a loved one. Then we were asked to trace our right hand and fill that in: That was how Grief and Death had changed us. Missy was on my mind, a gentle girl, so I left my mind and centered my feelings on my heart. The drawing of my left hand, before she died? It was all swirls of browns and ochres. The right hand? BURSTING with explosions of color.
How to explain it? And shouldn’t it be the other way around? Well, no. I’ve lost so many precious Beings that by this point, I know how my Heart, my Soul work: The browns and ochres? I’d held my day-to-day love a little too closely, caressing and loving, but just settled into Love. The fantastical colors after that sweet girl died? Oh how it broke me wide open, feeling EVERYthing, feeling her love so closely, so very purely.
Get ready for The Five Invitations to break you, open your Life to all things possible, to seeing colors in the next step of our Journeys here in this world as we all will step beyond to what miiiight be the greatest thing that has the ability to keep us honest, keep us living, breathing, loving so openly.
Lemme just get one thing outta the way first, however. The deeply loving, incredibly compassionate Frank Ostaseski narrates his own words here. Oh my gosh, does he have a soothing voice, or what?! As we were on the verge of wrapping up our Doula training, a dear Doulos companion sent out a query for three incredibly good books. The Five Invitations imMEDiately came to mind as I’d listened to it and remembered it having a great impact on me. -BUT- I’d had to admit that I’d have to give it a Listen again as I’d, uhm, well, kinda sorta dozed off several times through it, and I wanted to make sure it was NOT because it was boring or it meandered or anything. This week of Death and Life listening made this audiobook a MUST, and here is where I’ll say it: Noooo, it is in no way boring, and it meanders nary at all. It’s just that Ostaseski has such a soooothing voice that danged if I didn’t doze off yet again this time out (AWEsome dreams tho!!!). But lemme tell you, this is so good, so loving, so wise, that I went back to before I dozed to gain context: You may be soothed into slumber, but you’ll want context for his every single sentence. Plus, aside from the occasional doze (Which happened only once this time, and it was cuz The Kitten Krew woke me up at 4:40 in the morning… I feel no shame in blaming m’ cats), his voice is so very warm as well. He’s relating some experiences that are heavy in Grief, and you’ll want to cry because there’s a rumble as he speaks. But then he gets to the Beauty part of Grieving, and Dying, and Living, and that simple smoothness lands like the gentlest of kisses on a tiny child’s newly-dead forehead.
Glorious Glorious Glorious. And I COULD type out what-all each Invitation is (By the way, they came to him as he was on his way to speak, writing them down on a cocktail napkin), but do listen for yourself. This is not so much a Self-Development book where I’d iterate each, expounding and expanding upon so that you might judge one way or another—a Yea or Nay. No, there’s nothing to judge here, it’s personal, it’s something to open eyes and arms to. Embrace this.
Embrace your one precious life, embrace your grief, knowing there’s such love in it.
And give yourself the gift of Forgiveness, that letting go of pain, whether it’s personal failings, or it’s people who couldn’t quite be what you needed at the time. We’re all just making do as best we can.
Me? Embracing the Right Hand full of color; tracing m’ Left Hand anew. A new box of Crayola crayons handy.
Sky Blue, my Missy. You were my Sky Blue…
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