walking in wonder – john o’donohue

More Celtic wisdom from John O’Donohue.

“So many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence.”

One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways of wonder. Martin Heidegger said that when you can conceive of a frontier you are already beyond it, because a frontier—while it may be the limitation of where you now are or what you now feel or think—is also the threshold of what you are actually going to move into. This is put very lyrically and beautifully by a great rustic poet, our own Patrick Kavanagh, who said in his amazing “Advent” poem, “Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.”

Where I envy animals is that I don’t think they are haunted by consciousness in the way that humans are. I think that one of the most beautiful and frightening days in the life of a human person is when their mind really wakes up.

One of the questions that has always puzzled me is, is there a place where our vanished days secretly gather? To put it another way, like the medieval mystics used to ask, where does the light go when the candle is blown out?

There was a contest of wisdom one time in ancient Greece to find who could write down a sentence which would somehow always be true. The sentence that won the competition was “This too will pass.”

So is there a place where our vanished days secretly gather? I think there is, and I believe the name of that place is memory.

It’s sad that people don’t use their good memories and revisit again and again the harvest of memory that is within them, and live out of the riches of that harvest, rather than out of the poverty of their woundedness.

Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.

If you feel with your friend that you are called to the outer frontiers, then the friendship is in growth, and it also has a bit of danger in it, and a risk; and without risk in the world of the soul, nothing really grows.

Fear derives its power also from time and from the fragility of the human heart.

Fear is negative wonder.

That lovely phrase “Do not be afraid”; it is repeated 366 times in the Bible. That is once for every day and, as somebody said, once for no reason at all!

Hans-Georg Gadamer who said in his book Truth and Method that a horizon is something towards which we move but it is also something that moves along with us. One nice metaphor of human growth would be that you could be always moving to a new horizon, not abandoning the former ones, but in the graciousness of memory’s loyalty actually bringing them along with you so that you are coming to new places all the time.

Each person is always on the threshold between their inner world and their outer world, between light and darkness, between known and unknown, between question and quest, between fact and possibility. This threshold runs through every experience that we have, and our only real guide to this world is the imagination.

One of the lovely ways to pray is to take your body out into the landscape and to be still in it. Your body is made out of clay, so your body is actually a miniature landscape that has got up from under the earth and is now walking on the normal landscape.

For a New Beginning In out-of-the-way places of the heart, Where your thoughts never think to wander, This beginning has been quietly forming, Waiting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time it has watched your desire, Feeling the emptiness growing inside you, Noticing how you willed yourself on, Still unable to leave what you had outgrown. It watched you play with the seduction of safety And the gray promises that sameness whispered, Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent, Wondered would you always live like this. Then the delight, when your courage kindled, And out you stepped onto new ground, Your eyes young again with energy and dream, A path of plenitude opening before you. Though your destination is not yet clear You can trust the promise of this opening; Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning That is at one with your life’s desire. Awaken your spirit to adventure; Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk; Soon you will be home in a new rhythm For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

MEISTER ECKHART “There is a lonely edge to our lives which can only be filled by God.”

If you look at the history of thought and art, it is usually out of restless, turbulent times that great novelty and light emerge.

“Wild” is something you cannot tame—and I suppose one of the things institutional religion does is to have a few “official tamers” on hand in case the divine thing wakens up in too wild a way.

Eckhart is “wilder” in his thinking about God than even the best atheists. What you find in him about the wilderness and absence of God is so much more profound than the kind of vacancy you find in atheistic ideas. He says that God is that wilderness in which everyone is alone. God is only our word for it, and the nearer you get to the presence the more God ceases to be God and is allowed to become completely himself. So the spiritual life is about the liberation of God from our images of him.

At school we were taught that the soul is somewhere in the body, and when the body died, the soul departed. Eckhart comes at it the other way and sees the body as being in the soul, so the soul presence both suffuses you and is all around you as well.

“Thoughts are our inner senses.” Just as when an external sense like sight is impaired and we cannot see properly, so if our thoughts are weak or negative or impoverished we will never see anything in ourselves.

Angelus Silesius, wrote a beautiful short mystical poem called “Ohne Warum” (Without Why):

For Presence Awaken to the mystery of being here and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence. Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses. Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon. Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to follow its path. Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity. May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame. May anxiety never linger about you. May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul. Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention. Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul. May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.

Landscape is the firstborn of creation.

I think there is life in these rocks and in these great mountains around about us, and because there is life, there is memory. The more you live among mountains like this, the more aware you become of the cadences of the place and the subtlety of the place, its presence and personality.

Sheep are, I think, the undercover mystics of the Connemara landscape: I often think they are totally in a Zen mode of stillness! You would often see them, when driving the roads here, lying out in the middle of the road paying no attention to you as you slow down and pass on. They are chewing and ruminating on something totally different altogether.

It must be strange for a mountain to look at humans and the way they go around, their limbs and their eyes blurred by their desire and movement. And their inability to stay still in the one place.

As humans, do we intrude too much on the landscape? One of the most wonderful photographers in Ireland, a person who specializes in Connemara, is Fergus Bourke. He has taken some amazing black-and-white pictures of this place. I remember one day we had exactly that conversation: what gives the person the right to intrude on this place? I suppose the only thing you can say is that the quality of your presence here in this way, in order not to be voyeuristic or consumerist, has to slow down to the level of attention where you begin to come into the rhythm of the landscape. I think Fergus Bourke’s work is a witness to that, to incredible moments where he almost catches the landscape out in conversation with itself.

Meister Eckhart said that nothing in the universe resembles God so much as silence,

The English scientist Rupert Sheldrake was asked what single change he would recommend for the new millennium that could make a difference to the world. His reply was that every tourist should become a pilgrim.

There was a stone in the corner of a meadow and under that stone lived a colony of ants. They were just ordinary ants but among them lived a genius ant, an Einstein ant. One day the board of the colony addressed the genius ant, telling it that there was nothing more for it to learn and it would have to leave them and go out into the world. So on a misty October evening the colony bestowed its valediction on the genius and it made its entry into the world. There happened to be a totally non-metaphysical horse grazing nearby. Regardless of how brilliant our genius ant is, it will never be able to perceive the horse, such is the disproportion in size….So I wonder are there presences all around us, that because of the disproportion between our senses and their presence, we are not picking up at all?

“While we are here in the world, where is it that we are absent from?”

All absence holds the echo of some fractured intimacy,

So absence is never clear-cut. Everyone that leaves your life leaves a subtle trail of connection with you; and when you think of them, and miss them and desire them, your heart journeys out again along that trail towards them in the elsewhere that they now find themselves.

One of the deepest longings of the human heart is for real presence.

Naomi Shihab Nye, who has a wonderful poem called “The Art of Disappearing” that I would like to read.

When they say, “Don’t I know you?” say “No.”

When they invite you to a party, remember what parties are like before answering.

Someone telling you in a loud voice they once wrote a poem.

Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate. Then reply.

If they say, “We should get together,” say, “Why?”

It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.

You’re trying to remember something too important to forget. Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.

Tell them you have a new project.

It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store, nod briefly and become a cabbage.

When someone you haven’t seen in ten years appears at the door, don’t start singing him all your new songs.

You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.

Know you could tumble any second.

Then decide what to do with your time.

In post-modern culture, the mind is particularly homeless, haunted by a sense of absence that it can neither understand nor transfigure. Many of the traditional shelters have fallen down. Religion seems more and more, certainly in its official presentation, to speak in an idiom that is unable to converse with the modern spiritual hunger. Politics seems devoid of vision and is becoming more and more synonymous with economics. Consumerist culture worships accumulation and power, and creates, with incredible arrogance, its own hollow and gaudy hierarchies.

Our time is often filled up with forced presence, every minute filled out with something,

All fundamentalism is based both on faulty perception and on unreal nostalgia. What is created is a fake absence in relation to the past. It is used to look away from the challenge and potential of the present and to create a future which is meant to resemble a past that never actually existed.

Memory is the place where absence is transfigured and where our time in the world is secretly held for us. As we grow older, our bodies diminish, but our minds and our memories grow more intense.

Often in country places—probably in the city too—there was a haunted house, which no one would go into and people would pass with great care, especially late at night. I often think that there is, in every life, some haunted room that you never want to go into, and that you do your best to forget was there at all. You will never break in that door with your mind, or with your will. Only with the gentle coaxing of the imagination will that door be opened to you and will you be given the gift back again of a part of yourself that either you or someone else had forced you to drive away and reject.

Joseph Brodsky, who was in jail, said, “The awful thing about being a prisoner and being in jail is that you have very limited space, and unlimited time.” When you put those two things together, it is an incredible load on the mind.

Then there are those who deliberately choose the way of absence. These are the contemplatives. They are amazing people; they leave behind the whole bustle of the world, and submit their vulnerable minds to the acidic solitude of the contemplative cell. The contemplatives or the mystics are people who withdraw from the world to confront the monster in its lair.

Death is the ultimate absence.

All space is spiritual space, and in spiritual space there is no real distance. And this raises the question I would like to end with—a fascinating question: while we are here in the world, where is it that we are absent from?

We are always on our way from darkness into light.

To be born is to be chosen. None of us is accidentally in the world. We are sent here because there is something special for each of us to do here that could not be done by someone else. One of the wisdoms of living a full life is to try and sense what it is you were sent here for and to try and let the hindrances that block you from that fall away so that you can claim completely the life that was so generously offered to you.

We weren’t put here to make money or to acquire status or reputation. We were sent here to search for the light of Easter in our hearts, and when we find it we are meant to give it away generously.

One of the oldest words in Greek is the word for “air”—pneuma—and it is also the word for “spirit.” One of the first words for God in Hebrew is Rua, which also means “wind.”

“The real mystery is not that things are the way they are, but that there is something rather than nothing.”

If you reflect on your own experience, you will see that you are already familiar with duality. There is light and darkness, beginning and ending, inside and outside, above and below, masculine and feminine, divine and human, time and eternity, soul and sense, word and silence. The really fascinating thing is not that these dualities are there, but the threshold where they actually meet each other. I believe that any notion of balance that is really authentic has to work with the notion of threshold. Otherwise, balance is just a functional strategy without any ontological depth or grounding. In the Western tradition, that line, that threshold between light and darkness, between soul and body, God and human, between ourselves and nature has often been atrophied. When the threshold freezes, the two sides get cut off from each other and the result is dualism. That kind of separation has really blighted and damaged the Western tradition Duality, then, is informed by the oppositions that meet at this threshold. I would argue that an authentic life is a life that is aware of and willing to engage its own oppositions, and honorably inhabits that threshold where the light and darkness, the masculine and feminine and all the beginnings and endings of one’s life engage.

The truth is whole.

Heraclitus, a philosopher in fifth-century B.C. Greece. He said that you can never step into the same river twice because if you step in at four o’clock and again at five past four, the river has completely changed, and you have changed as well.

The media is essentially like Plato’s Cave—a parade of shadows that we take for the real world.

What is interesting about contradictions is that each person is a bundle of contradictions. Normally we are not aware of our contradictory nature because there is so much of ourselves that we keep completely hidden. Perhaps one of the reasons we are on this planet is to try to become acquainted with all that is in us. When you meet someone who is not afraid of themselves it is a lovely experience. They might be a mass of contradictions but at least they have patience with their own otherness.

Usually, the way we settle and compromise with ourselves is by choosing one side over the other side, and we settle for that reductionism until something awakens the other side, and then the two of them are engaged.

A man went to see a guru as he was finding it difficult to meditate because his mind was scattered. The guru said to him, “I want you to go home and not think about monkeys.” Surprised at the advice, because monkeys never figured in his mind, the man nevertheless returned home intending to carry out the advice. Once at home, he started to try not to think about monkeys. First there was one monkey and then there were two monkeys, then there were ten monkeys. Within two hours he was back to the guru as his mind had become an exclusive monkey jungle. Thus, there is a strange thing in consciousness, in the mind, that if you make an issue of something it can expand and possess you. This seems to be what happens with bitterness. A bitter person cannot decide to be bitter between 7:00 and 7:30 on Saturday evenings, because if you are bitter, it is within you everywhere. Resentment is exactly the same kind of thing. Resentment, bitterness, defeat, despair, even depression—all of these share this pervasive quality. When I sit in front of somebody who is clinically, chronically depressed, the feeling that I have sometimes is that the person is not actually there. The fascinating question is, where are they?

If you are afraid of things, you will stay in line.

Much of what passes for conversation in post-modern culture is merely intercepting monologues.

The place where your balance is regulated is also the place where your hearing and listening are activated. This is in the fluid of the semicircular canals of the inner ear. The eighth nerve goes through this liquid in the inner ear. Therefore, true balance in the body is linked to listening, but also metaphorically, true balance is linked to an attentiveness that allows you to engage fully with a situation, a person or your culture or memory so that the hidden balance within can emerge.

True balance is a grace. It is something that is given to you. When you watch somebody walking the high wire, you know that they could tumble any second. That is the way we all are.

In philosophical terms what is going on here is a reduction of the “who” question about presence and person, to the “what” question and the “how” question.

Most of us are moving through such an undergrowth of excess that we cannot sense the shape of ourselves anymore.

There is a massive functionalism at the heart of our times, a huge imbalance in post-modernity, primarily because certain key conversations are not taking place.

One conversation that is not taking place is a conversation between the privileged and the poor.

Another conversation that is not happening, which is a terrifying non-event, is the conversation between the Western culture and Islam.

In relation to the Irish context, there is an urgent need for greater dialogue between the forces of city culture and the rural domain.

In Connemara, the people say, Tá an nádúr ag imeacht as na daoine, the nature is going out of people.

When people have very little, it is natural for them to be close. I am not romanticizing poverty; it is a horrible thing, full of drudgery. Think of all the people who had to emigrate because there was nothing for them. But yet there was some kind of nádúr, or closeness. It seems to be impossible for a culture to develop economically and get really rich and yet maintain the same nádúr and closeness. So the question is: where could we find new places to awaken something in us in order that we do not lose that sense of nádúr and of belonging with each other?

G. B. Shaw said that youth is wasted on the young, so springtime is always a season that somehow resembles the energy of youth. Autumntime seems to mirror the gathering and the harvest of old age. One of the amazing lines in the Bible that I really like is a line from the prophet Haggai, who says, “You have sown so much and harvested so little.” I feel that old age and aging is a time of great gathering, a time of sifting and a time of reaping the rewards of forgotten and neglected experience.

As the body diminishes, the soul gets richer. In old age, one of the things you have, whatever way you want to construct it, is time. When you have time, your soul begins to decipher things more and more.

The Carthusian monks, the contemplatives, who wear this habit with a cowl on it, and that then is sewn up when they die and becomes the shroud in which they are laid out. I would look at old age in a positive way, as a time of weaving the eternal shroud, the things that you take with you into the eternal world.

You’d never see a trailer after a hearse!” You can take nothing with you but the interior things, which have reached a level of refinement that there is no barrier that they have to pass through. In that sense, aging is the ultimate refinement and ultimate harvest.

If you look at the anthropology of tribal cultures, that the elders were always the people of wisdom. Nowadays, we put them away in old people’s homes.

You often get more encouragement in relation to your own wildness and sense of danger and carelessness from an old person than from anyone who is stuck in the middle of a system or a role or the kind of atrophied complacency that often passes for achievement and respectability.

I love the word “careless.” You know the way people say, “Well, he’s a careless kind of an individual.” In one sense, that can mean that there is no responsibility in him. In its literal sense it can mean that he is care-less, that there are no false burdens of care on him, and that when he comes to the threshold of an experience, he enters it with full availability, full courage and full wildness. It would be lovely in old age, as the body sheds its power, if each of us who would be pilgrims into that time could shed the false gravity and the weight that we carry for a lot of our lives and if we could enter our old age almost like a baby enters childhood, with the same kind of gracefulness, of possibility, and the same kind of innocence, but a second innocence rather than a first one.

The contemplatives need ritual to make their way through the deserts of solitude. If you sit down in an armchair by the fire and you allow the days come on like big empty grey rooms, to come around your head, you will turn and feed on your own negativity. Contemplatives survive because the day is divided into times of praise, prayer, ritual, and in order to survive solitude needs ritual.

Old age, like illness, is a time when you really need to mind yourself. If you get hooked on some of the down pulls of gravity in your soul, it can be a time of torture so that you pray for release – to die would be total peace. If you look on it as a time of possibility, amazing things can happen. A good axiom in life is to try and see the possibilities in a situation. Often in a situation, it is the walls we see, it is the door where the key has been thrown away that we see, and we never see the windows of possibilities and the places where thoughts and feelings can grow.

How we view the future actually shapes the future period time isn’t like space at all. When you think of space, you think of Connemara with the mountains stretching out with no walls at all, and if you look at Clare you see the little fears and the space stretching out towards the mountains and towards the ocean. We falsely think that time is like that too. You walk through the field of today and then you cross over to the field of tomorrow and then to the field of the day after that. But it’s not like that. Time comes towards us unshaken, predominantly, and it is our expectation that shapes the time that is coming. So expectation creates the future. If you bring creative expectation to your future, no matter what difficulty may lie and wait for you, you will be able to somehow transfigure it. Whereas if you bring really negative expectation to your future, you will turn yourself totally into a tower of misery.

There’s great wisdom in perspective and distance. It is usually when we are myopic and close up to a thing and we can’t see its contour at all, that it totally imprisons and controls us. Whereas sometimes when you step back, you get another view, and you pick up a way of relating to the event or the situation which frees you predominantly.

The passionate heart never ages, and if you keep your Eros and your passion alive, then in some subtle, inevitable way, you are already in the eternal world.

I think what happens in loneliness is that we panic; we somehow see ourselves as isolated and distant from others, and then we really feel abandoned.

You can only relate to someone if you somehow have the courage and the need to inhabit your own solitude. You can only relate out of your separateness, otherwise you are just using the other person to shield you from your own solitude.

Old age is a time of great freedom. One of the things that militates against freedom for most humans is the weight of responsibility – all they have to do, and their constant obsession with the current project and with the project of life.

And awful lot of people in contemporary culture postpone their real lives until they retire. They worked like hell to get everything worked out and everything achieved, and then they believed that when they have that done, they will have time to enjoy. Some of them do actually achieve it.

Patrick Kavanagh has said that we were taught to prepare for life rather than live it.

That is maybe the primary intention of all holiness, spirituality and love – to free us for our lives.

Mexican poet Octavio Paz:

With great difficulty advancing by millimeters each year, I carve out a road out of the rock. For millenniums my teeth have wasted and my nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and the open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work. I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life.

Death is the unseen companion, the unknown companion who walks every step of the journey with us. It came out of the womb with us and has been with us till now and is here with us today. Part of the art of living, creative living, is to transfigure the different difficulties that you have, the negative things in your life. As you begin to transfigure them, what you are ultimately transfiguring is the presence of your own death. And then when death comes to you at the end, it won’t be a monster expelling you against your will from the shelter of your familiarity. In many ways, death could become the truest image of your life and your own self. Maybe at death, there is a very beautiful meeting between you and yourself.

So where does the soul go? Meister Eckhart had a simple answer to that. It goes nowhere. The eternal world is not some faraway galaxy that we haven’t discovered yet. The eternal world is here. The dead are here with us, invisible to us, but we can sense their presence. They are looking out for us.

John Moriarty, the wonderful Kerry philosopher, says that time is eternity living dangerously.