This book came to me through the On Being podcast.
Anam Cara means “Soul Friend” in Gaelic. One should consider oneself very fortunate if there is even one of these in your life. Here are some highlights from the book that spoke to me. It is surely a book that one needs to read again and again.
The deepest dream of the human heart is to be held and called beloved on this earth. Anam Cara (the book) is a hymn to our dream of being called beloved on this earth.
We live by images, consciously and instinctively. The image of the spiral and the circle are what surrounds the Burren landscape of John’s home; linearity and its errors are stuff of a later hubris in both spirituality and science.
“Colours are the wounds of light.”
Since the Celts were a nature people, the world of nature was both a presence and a companion. Nature nourished them; it was here that they felt their deepest belonging and affinity.
We need a light that has retained its kinship with the darkness. For we are sons and daughters of the darkness and of the light.
Though the human body is born complete in one moment, the birth of the human heart is an ongoing process.
Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfillment.
When this spiritual path opens, you can bring an incredible generosity to the world and to the lives of others. Sometimes, it is easy to be generous outward, to give and give and give and yet remain ungenerous to yourself. You lose the balance of your soul if you do not learn to take care of yourself. You need to be generous to yourself in order to receive the love that surrounds you. You can suffer from a desperate hunger to be loved. You can search long years in lonely places, far outside yourself. Yet the whole time, this love is but a few inches away from you. It is at the edge of your soul, but you have been blind to its presence. Through some hurt, a door has slammed shut within the heart, and you are powerless to unlock it and receive the love. We must remain attentive in order to be able to receive. Boris Pasternak said, “When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.”
It is strangely ironic that the world loves power and possessions. You can be very successful in this world, be admired by everyone, have endless possessions, a lovely family, success in your work, and have everything the world can give, but behind it all, you can be completely lost and miserable. If you have everything the world has to offer you, but you do not have love, then you are the poorest of the poorest of the poor. Every human heart hungers for love. If you do not have the warmth of love in your heart, there is no possibility of real celebration and enjoyment. No matter how hard, competent, self-assured, or respected you are, no matter what you think of yourself or what others think of you, the one thing you deeply long for is love. No matter where we are, who we are, what we are, or what kind of journey we are on, we all need love.
“The wish for friendship develops rapidly, but friendship does not.”
The anam-ċara experience opens a friendship that is not wounded or limited by separation or distance. Such friendship can remain alive even when the friends live far away from each other. Because they have broken through the barriers of persona and egoism to the soul level, the unity of their souls is not easily severed. When the soul is awakened, physical space is transfigured. Even across the distance, two friends can stay attuned to each other and continue to sense the flow of each other’s lives. With your anam ċara you awaken the eternal. In this soul-space, there is no distance.
We do not need to go out to find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.
The fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart says that all of human life stands under the shadow of nothingness, the umbra nihili.
We cannot fill up our emptiness with objects, possessions, or people. We have to go deeper into that emptiness; then we will find beneath nothingness the flame of love waiting to warm us.
In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is anam ċara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and ċara is the word for friend. So anam ċara in the Celtic world was the “soul friend.” In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam ċara. It originally referred to someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anam ċara you could share your innermost self, your mind and your heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam ċara, your friendship cut across all convention, morality, and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the “friend of your soul.” The Celtic understanding did not set limitations of space or time on the soul. There is no cage for the soul. The soul is a divine light that flows into you and into your Other. This art of belonging awakened and fostered a deep and special companionship. In his Conferences, John Cassian says this bond between friends is indissoluble: “This, I say, is what is broken by no chances, what no interval of time or space can sever or destroy, and what even death itself cannot part.”
In everyone’s life, there is great need for an anam ċara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul. This recognition is described in a beautiful line from Pablo Neruda: “You are like nobody since I love you.” This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person’s individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it can decipher identity and destiny.
Awareness is one of the greatest gifts you can bring to your friendship.
In our culture, there is an excessive concentration on the notion of relationship. People talk incessantly about relationships. It is a constant theme on television, film, and in the media. Technology and media are not uniting the world. They pretend to provide a world that is internetted, but in reality, all they deliver is a simulated world of shadows. Accordingly, they make our human world more anonymous and lonely. In a world where the computer replaces human encounter and psychology replaces religion, it is no wonder that there is an obsession with relationship. Unfortunately, however, “relationship” has become an empty center around which our lonely hunger forages for warmth and belonging.
“The friends thou hast and their attention tried, grapple them to your soul with hoops of steel.”
Goethe’s “Blessed Longing.”
Tell no one else, only the wise
For the crowd will sneer at one
I wish to praise what is fully alive,
What longs to flame toward death.
When the calm enfolds the love-nights
That created you, where you have created
A feeling from the Unkown steals over you
While the tranquil candle burns.
You remain no longer caught
In the peneumbral gloom
You are stirred and new, you desire
To soar to higher creativity.
No distance makes you ambivalent.
You come on wings, enchanted
In such hunger for light, you
Become the butterfly burnt to nothing.
So long as you have not lived this:
To die is to become new,
You remain a gloomy guest
On the dark earth.
Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition. This metaphor of friendship can be grounded in the clay nature of the human body. When you find the person you love, an act of ancient recognition brings you together. It is as if millions of years before the silence of nature broke, your lover’s clay and your clay lay side by side. Then in the turning of the seasons, your one clay divided and separated. You began to rise as distinct clay forms, each housing a different individuality and destiny. Without even knowing it, your secret memory mourned your loss of each other. While your clay selves wandered for thousands of years through the universe, your longing for each other never faded. This metaphor helps to explain how in the moment of friendship two souls suddenly recognize each other. It could be a meeting on the street, or at a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is the flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing. Love opens the door of ancient recognition. You enter. You come home to each other at last. As Euripides said, “Two friends, one soul.”
Meister Eckhart writes beautifully about this temptation. He says many people wonder where they should be and what they should do, when in fact they should be more concerned about how to be.
The Buddhist tradition has a lovely concept of friendship, the notion of the Kalyana-mitra, the “noble friend.” Your Kalyana-mitra, your noble friend, will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness. No one can see his life totally. As there is a blind spot in the retina of the human eye, there is also in the soul a blind side where you are not able to see. Therefore you must depend on the one you love to see for you what you cannot see for yourself. Your Kalyana-mitra complements your vision in a kind and critical way. Such friendship is creative and critical; it is willing to negotiate awkward and uneven territories of contradiction and woundedness.
One of the deepest longings of the human soul is the longing to be seen.
When talking about primal things, the Germans talk of ursprüngliche Dinge—original things. There is an Ur-Intimität in der Seele; that is, a primal intimacy in the soul; this original echo whispers within every heart.
You can never love another person unless you are equally involved in the beautiful but difficult spiritual work of learning to love yourself.
Love should make you free. You become free of the hungry, blistering need with which you continually reach out to scrape affirmation, respect, and significance for yourself from things and people outside yourself.
You can search far and in hungry places for love. It is a great consolation to know that there is a wellspring of love within yourself. If you trust that this wellspring is there, you will then be able to invite it to awaken. The following exercise could help develop awareness of this capacity. When you have moments on your own or spaces in your time, just focus on the well at the root of your soul. Imagine that nourishing stream of belonging, ease, peace, and delight. Feel, with your visual imagination, the refreshing waters of that well gradually flowing up through the arid earth of the neglected side of your heart. It is helpful to imagine this particularly before you sleep. Then during the night you will be in a constant flow of enrichment and belonging. You will find that when you awake at dawn, there will be a lovely, quiet happiness in your spirit. One of the most precious things you should always preserve in a friendship and in love is your own difference. It can happen within the circle of love that one person will tend to imitate the other or reimagine himself in the image of the other. While this may indicate a desire for total commitment, it is also destructive and dangerous. There was an old man I knew on an island off the West of Ireland. He had an unusual hobby. He used to collect photographs of newly married couples. He would then get a photograph of that couple some ten years later. From this second photograph, he would begin to demonstrate how one member of the couple was beginning to resemble the other. Often in a relationship there can be a subtle homogenizing force, which is destructive. The irony is that it is usually the difference between people that makes one person attractive to another. Consequently, this difference needs to be preserved and nurtured.
In order to preserve your own difference in love, you need plenty of room for your soul. It is interesting that in Hebrew one of the original words for salvation is also the word for space. If you were born on a farm, you realize that space is vital, especially when you are sowing something. If you plant two trees side by side, they will smother each other. That which grows needs space. Kahlil Gibran says, “Let there be spaces in your togetherness. Let the winds of the heavens dance between you.” Space allows your otherness to find its own rhythm and contour. Yeats speaks of “a little space for the rose breath to fill.”
The mystics never preach a denial of the senses, rather they speak of the transfiguration of the senses.
A clay creature is always a mixture of light and darkness.
Pablo Neruda has written some of the most beautiful love lines. He says, “I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, / dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. / I want / to do with you what Spring does with the cherry trees.”
Two people who love each other should never feel called to explain to an outside party why they love each other, or why it is that they belong together. The place that they belong is a secret place. Their souls know why they are together; and they should trust that togetherness. If you keep interfering with your connection with your Other, your lover, your anam ċara, you gradually begin to force a distance between you.
Their relationship consisted in discussing if it existed.
Dante’s notion that the secret rhythm of the universe is the rhythm of love, which moves the stars and the planets. Love is the source, center, and destiny of experience.
A FRIENDSHIP BLESSING May you be blessed with good friends. May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
In the human face, the anonymity of the universe becomes intimate.
The human face is the subtle yet visual autobiography of each person. Regardless of how concealed or hidden the inner story of your life is, you can never successfully hide from the world while you have a face. If we knew how to read the faces of others, we would be able to decipher the mysteries of their life stories. The face always reveals the soul; it is where the divinity of the inner life finds an echo and image. When you behold someone’s face, you are gazing deeply into that person’s life.
In a certain sense, to gaze into the face of another is to gaze into the depth and entirety of his life.
It suits us to pretend that we all belong to the one world, but we are more alone than we realize.
The infinity that haunts everyone and which no one can finally quell is the infinity of one’s own interiority.
A friend of mine who loves lace often says that it is the holes in the lace that render it beautiful. Our experience has this lace structure.
The human face carries mystery and is the exposure point of the mystery of the individual life. It is where the private, inner world of a person protrudes into the anonymous world. While the rest of the body is covered, the face is naked. The vulnerability of this nakedness issues a profound invitation for understanding and compassion. The human face is a meeting place of two unknowns: the infinity of the outer world and the unchartered, inner world to which each individual alone has access.
The face is the pinnacle of the body. Your body is as ancient as the clay of the universe from which it is made; and your feet on the ground are a constant connection with the earth. Your feet bring your private clay in touch with the ancient, mother clay from which you first emerged. Consequently, your face being at the top of your body signifies the ascent of your clay-life into intimacy and selfhood. It is as if the clay of your body becomes intimate and personal through the ever new expressions of your face. Beneath the dome of the skull, the face is the place where your clay-life takes on a real human presence.
The body is the place where the soul shows itself.
The body is also very truthful. You know from your own life that your body rarely lies. Your mind can deceive you and put all kinds of barriers between you and your nature; but your body does not lie. Your body tells you, if you attend to it, how your life is and whether you are living from your soul or from the labyrinths of your negativity.
The body has had such a low and negative profile in the world of spirituality because spirit has been understood more in terms of the air element than the earth element.
Spirituality is the art of transfiguration. We should not force ourselves to change by hammering our lives into any predetermined shape.
Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.
“Pleasure is the tribute we owe to our dignity as human beings.”
Joseph Brodsky said beautifully, An object makes infinity private.
When you really look deeply at something, it becomes part of you. This is one of the sinister aspects of television. People are constantly looking at empty and false images; these impoverished images are filling up the inner world of the heart. The modern world of image and electronic media is reminiscent of Plato’s wonderful allegory of the cave. The prisoners are in one line, chained together, looking at the wall of the cave. The fire behind them casts images onto the wall. The prisoners believe that what they see on the wall of that cave is reality. Yet all they are seeing are shadows of reflections. Television and the computer world are great empty shadow-lands. To look at something that can gaze back at you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen your sense of vision.
Many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it anymore. An interesting question to ask yourself at night is, What did I really see this day?
To the fearful eye, all is threatening.
To the greedy eye, everything can be possessed.
Greed is poignant because it is always haunted and emptied by future possibility; it can never engage presence. However, the more sinister aspect of greed is its ability to sedate and extinguish desire. It destroys the natural innocence of desire, dismantles its horizons, and replaces them with a driven and atrophied possessiveness.
To the resentful eye, everything is begrudged.
To the indifferent eye, nothing calls or awakens.
To the inferior eye, everyone else is greater.
To the loving eye, everything is real.
Many of the words we use are of the fast-food spiritual variety.
Traditionally, the breath was understood as the pathway through which the soul entered the body. Breaths come in pairs except the first breath and the last breath. At the deepest level, breath is sister of spirit. One of the most ancient words for spirit is the Hebrew word Ruah; this is also the word for air or wind.
With the sense of hearing, we listen to creation. One of the great thresholds in reality is the threshold between sound and silence. All good sounds have silence near, behind, and within them. The first sound that every human hears is the sound of the mother’s heartbeat in the dark lake water of the womb. This is the reason for our ancient resonance with the drum as a musical instrument. The sound of the drum brings us consolation because it brings us back to that time when we were at one with the mother’s heartbeat. That was a time of complete belonging. No separation had yet opened; we were completely in unity with another person. P. J. Curtis, the great Irish authority on rhythm and blues music, often says that the search for meaning is really the search for the lost chord. When the lost chord is discovered by humankind, the discord in the world will be healed and the symphony of the universe will come into complete harmony with itself.
Martin Heidegger says that true listening is worship. When you listen with your soul, you come into rhythm and unity with the music of the universe.
Poets are people who become utterly dedicated to the threshold where silence and language meet.
The Celtic mind was never drawn to the single line; it avoided ways of seeing and being that seek satisfaction in certainty. The Celtic mind had a wonderful respect for the mystery of the circle and the spiral.
The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected, the sacred vanishes. Consequently, reflection should not shine too severe or aggressive a light in on the world of the soul. The light in Celtic consciousness is a penumbral light.
There is an unprecedented spiritual hunger in our times. More and more people are awakening to the inner world. A thirst and hunger for the eternal is coming alive in their souls; this is a new form of consciousness. Yet one of the damaging aspects of this spiritual hunger is the way it sees everything in such a severe and insistent light. The light of modern consciousness is not gentle or reverent; it lacks graciousness in the presence of mystery; it wants to unriddle and control the unknown. Modern consciousness is similar to the harsh and brilliant white light of a hospital operating theater. This neon light is too direct and clear to befriend the shadowed world of the soul. It is not hospitable to what is reserved and hidden. The Celtic mind had a wonderful respect for the mystery and depth of the individual soul. The Celts recognized that the shape of each soul is different; the spiritual clothing one person wears can never fit the soul of another. It is interesting that the word revelation comes from re-valere, literally, “to veil again.” The world of the soul is glimpsed through the opening in a veil that closes again. There is no direct, permanent, or public access to the divine. Each destiny has a unique curvature and must find its own spiritual belonging and direction. Individuality is the only gateway to spiritual potential and blessing. When the spiritual search is too intense and hungry, the soul stays hidden. The soul was never meant to be seen completely. It is more at home in a light that is hospitable to shadow. Before electricity, people used candlelight at night. The ideal light to befriend the darkness, it gently opens up caverns in the darkness and prompts the imagination into activity. The candle allows the darkness to keep its secrets. There is shadow and color within every candle flame. Candlelight perception is the most respectful and appropriate form of light with which to approach the inner world. It does not force our tormented transparency upon the mystery. The glimpse is sufficient. Candlelight perception has the finesse and reverence appropriate to the mystery and autonomy of soul. Such perception is at home at the threshold. It neither needs nor desires to invade the temenos where the divine lives. In our times, the language of psychology is used to approach the soul. Psychology is a wonderful science. In many ways, it has been the explorer whose heroic adventure discovered the uncharted inner world. In our culture of sensate immediacy, much psychology has abandoned the fecundity and reverence of myth and stands under the strain of neon consciousness, powerless to retrieve or open the depth and density of the world of soul. Celtic mysticism recognizes that rather than trying to expose the soul or offer it our fragile care, we should let the soul find us and care for us. Celtic mysticism is tender to the senses and devoid of spiritual aggression. The stories, poetry, and prayer of the Celts find expression in a language that is obviously prediscursive. It is a language of lyrical and reverential observation. Often it is reminiscent of the purity of the Japanese haiku. It bypasses the knottedness of narcissistic, self-reflexive language to create a lucid shape of words through which the numinous depths of nature and divinity can glisten. Celtic spirituality recognizes wisdom and the slow light, which can guard and deepen your life. When your soul awakens, your destiny becomes urgent with creativity. Though destiny reveals itself slowly and partially, we sense its intention in the human countenance. I have always been fascinated by human presence in a landscape. When you walk the mountains and meet another person, you become acutely aware of the human face as an icon cast against the wilderness of nature. The face is a threshold where a world looks out and a world looks in on itself. The face brings these two worlds together. Behind each human face is a hidden world that no one can see. The beauty of the spiritual is its depth of inner friendship, which can totally change everything you touch, see, and feel. In a sense, the face is where the individual soul becomes obliquely visible. Yet the soul remains fugitive because the face cannot express directly everything we intuit and feel. Nevertheless, with age and memory the face gradually mirrors the journey of the soul. The older the face, the richer its mirroring.
Each one of us has something to do here that can be done by no one else.
If you can awaken this sense of destiny, you come into rhythm with your life. You fall out of rhythm when you renege on your potential and talent, when you settle for the mediocre as a refuge from the call. When you lose rhythm, your life becomes wearyingly deliberate or anonymously automatic. Rhythm is the secret key to balance and belonging.
When a well awakens in the mind, new possibilities begin to flow, and you find within yourself a depth and excitement that you never knew you had. This art of awakening is suggested by the Irish writer James Stephens, who said, “The only barrier is our readiness.” We often remain exiles, left outside the rich world of the soul, simply because we are not ready. Our task is to refine our hearts and minds. There is so much blessing and beauty near us that is destined for us, and yet it cannot enter our lives because we are not ready to receive it. The handle is on the inside of the door; only we can open it. Our lack of readiness is often caused by blindness, fear, and lack of self-appreciation.
Sometimes our spiritual programs take us far away from our inner belonging. We become addicted to the methods and programs of psychology and religion. We become so desperate to learn how to be, that our lives pass, and we neglect the practice of being. One of the lovely things in the Celtic mind is its sense of spontaneity, which is one of the greatest spiritual gifts.
One of the greatest enemies of spiritual belonging is the ego. The ego does not reflect the real shape of one’s individuality. The ego is the false self born out of fear and defensiveness. The ego is a protective crust that we draw around our affections. It is created out of timidity, the failure to trust the Other and to respect our own Otherness. One of the greatest conflicts in life is the conflict between the ego and the soul. The ego is threatened, competitive, and stressed, whereas the soul is drawn more toward surprise, spontaneity, the new and the fresh.
The past is forsaken as unredeemable, the present is used as the fulcrum to a future that bodes holiness, integration, or perfection. When time is reduced to linear progress, it is emptied of presence. Meister Eckhart radically revises the whole notion of spiritual programs. He says that there is no such thing as a spiritual journey. If a little shocking, this is refreshing. If there were a spiritual journey, it would be only a quarter inch long, though many miles deep.
The eternal is not elsewhere; it is not distant. There is nothing as near as the eternal. This is captured in a lovely Celtic phrase: “Tá tír na n-óg ar chul an tí—tír álainn trina chéile”—that is, “The land of eternal youth is behind the house, a beautiful land fluent within itself.”
“Generally, the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is not known.”
Familiarity enables us to tame, control, and ultimately forget the mystery.
Familiarity is one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation.
The first step in awakening to your inner life and to the depth and promise of your solitude would be to consider yourself for a little while as a stranger to your own deepest depths. To decide to view yourself as a complete stranger, someone who has just stepped ashore in your life, is a liberating exercise. This meditation helps to break the numbing stranglehold of complacency and familiarity. Gradually, you begin to sense the mystery and magic of yourself. You realize that you are not the helpless owner of a deadened life but rather a temporary guest gifted with blessings and possibilities you could neither invent nor earn.
The human body is at home on the earth. It is probably a splinter in the mind that is the sore root of so much of our exile. This tension between clay and mind is the source of all creativity.
If you knew the beloved’s body well enough, you could imagine where her clay had lain before it came to form in her. You could sense the blend of different tonalities in her clay: Maybe some clay came from beside a calm lake, some from places where nature was exposed and lonely, and more from secluded and reserved places. We never know how many places of nature meet within the human body. Landscape is not all external, some has crept inside the soul. Human presence is infused with landscape.
Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging. One of the lovely things about us as individuals is the incommensurable in us. In each person, there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for the things we need from within. The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by yourself. They are at home at the hearth of your soul.
In everyone’s inner solitude there is that bright and warm hearth. The idea of the unconscious, even though it is a very profound and wonderful idea, has sometimes frightened people away from coming back to their own hearth. We falsely understand the subconscious as the cellar where all of our repression and self-damage is housed. Out of our fear of ourselves we have imagined monsters down there. Yeats says, “Man needs reckless courage to descend into the abyss of himself.” In actual fact, these demons do not account for all the subconscious. The primal energy of our soul holds a wonderful warmth and welcome for us. One of the reasons we were sent onto the earth was to make this connection with ourselves, this inner friendship. The demons will haunt us, if we remain afraid. All the classical mythical adventures externalize the demons. In battle with them, the hero always grows, ascending to new levels of creativity and poise. Each inner demon holds a precious blessing that will heal and free you. To receive this gift, you have to lay aside your fear and take the risk of loss and change that every inner encounter offers.
In theological or spiritual terms, we can understand this point of absolute nonconnection with everything as a sacred opening in the soul that can be filled by nothing external. Often all the possessions we have, the work we do, the beliefs we hold, are manic attempts to fill this opening, but they never stay in place. They always slip, and we are left more vulnerable and exposed than before. A time comes when you know that you can no longer wallpaper this void. Until you really listen to the call of this void, you will remain an inner fugitive, driven from refuge to refuge, always on the run with no place to call home. To be natural is to be holy; but it is very difficult to be natural. To be natural is to be at home with your own nature. If you are outside yourself, always reaching beyond yourself, you avoid the call of your own mystery. When you acknowledge the integrity of your solitude and settle into its mystery, your relationships with others take on a new warmth, adventure, and wonder.
There is also the lovely story of the wolf-spider, which never builds its web between two hard objects like two stones. If it did this, the web would be rent by the wind. Instinctively, it builds its web between two blades of grass. When the wind comes, the web lowers with the grass until the wind has passed, then it comes back up and finds its point of balance and equilibrium again. These are beautiful images for a mind in rhythm with itself. We put terrible pressure on our minds. When we tighten them or harden our views or beliefs, we lose all the softness and flexibility that makes for real shelter, belonging, and protection. Sometimes the best way of caring for your soul is to make flexible again some of the views that harden and crystalize your mind; for these alienate you from your own depth and beauty. Creativity seems to demand flexible and measured tension. In musical terms, the image of the violin is instructive here. If the strings are tuned too tightly they snap. When the tuning is balanced, the violin can endure massive force and produce the most powerful and tender music.
Only in your solitude will you come upon your own beauty. In Connemara, where there are a lot of fishing villages, there is a phrase that says, “Is fánach an áit a gheobfá gliomach”—that is, “It is in the unexpected or neglected place that you will find the lobster.” In the neglected crevices and corners of your evaded solitude, you will find the treasure that you have always sought elsewhere. Ezra Pound said something similar about beauty: Beauty likes to keep away from the public glare. It likes to find a neglected or abandoned place, for it knows that it is only here it will meet the kind of light that repeats its shape, dignity, and nature. There is a deep beauty within each person. Modern culture is obsessed with cosmetic perfection. Beauty is standardized; it has become another product for sale. In its real sense, beauty is the illumination of your soul.
The harvest of memory opens when solitude is ripe. This is captured succinctly by Wordsworth in his response to the memory of the daffodils: “Oft when on my couch I lie / In vacant or pensive mood / They flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.”
Meister Eckhart illuminates this point. He says that there is a place in the soul that neither space nor time nor flesh can touch. This is the eternal place within us. It would be a lovely gift to yourself to go there often—to be nourished, strengthened, and renewed. The deepest things that you need are not elsewhere.
Phenomenology has shown us that all consciousness is consciousness of something. The world is never simply there outside us. Our intentionality constructs it. For the most part, we construct our world so naturally that we are unaware that we are doing this every moment. It seems that the same rhythm of construction works inwardly, too. Our intentionality constructs the landscapes of our inner world. Maybe it is time now for a phenomenology of soul. The soul creates, shapes, and peoples our inner life. The gateway to our deepest identity is not through mechanical analysis. We need to listen to the soul and articulate its wisdom in a poetic and mystical form.
If you can learn to look at yourself and your life in a gentle, creative, and adventurous way, you will be eternally surprised at what you find. In other words, we never meet anything totally or purely. We see everything through the lens of thought. The way that you think determines what you will actually discover. This is expressed wonderfully by Meister Eckhart: “Thoughts are our inner senses.” We know that when our outer senses are impaired, this immediately diminishes the presence of the world to us. If your sight is poor, the world becomes a blur. If your hearing is damaged, a dull silence replaces what could be music or the voice of your beloved. In a similar way, if your thoughts are impaired or if they are negative or diminished, then you will never discover anything rich or beautiful within your soul. If thoughts are our inner senses, and if we allow our thoughts to be impoverished and pale, then the riches of our inner world can never come to meet us. We have to imagine more courageously if we are to greet creation more fully.
Each of us needs to learn the unique language of our own soul.
Dostoyevsky said that many people lived their lives without ever finding themselves in themselves.
This process of self-discovery is not easy; it may involve suffering, doubt, dismay. But we must not shrink from the fullness of our being in attempting to reduce the pain.
Silence is one of the great victims of modern culture. We live in an intense and visually aggressive age; everything is drawn outward toward the sensation of the image. A consequence of culture becoming ever more homogenized and universalist is that image has such power. With the continued netting of everything, chosen images can immediately attain universality. There is an incredibly subtle and powerfully calculating industry of modern dislocation, where that which is deep and lives in the silence within us is completely ignored. The surfaces of our minds continue to be seduced by the power of images. There is a sinister eviction taking place; peoples’ lives are being dragged outward all the time. The inner world of the soul is suffering a great eviction by the landlord forces of advertising and external social reality. This outer exile really impoverishes us. One of the reasons so many people are suffering from stress is not that they are doing stressful things but that they allow so little time for silence. A fruitful solitude without silence and space is inconceivable.
“A certain brother came to the abbot Moses in Scete seeking a word from him. And the old man said to him, ‘Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you all things.’”
So much of our modern talk is like a spider weaving a web of language maniacally outside itself. Our parallel monologues with their staccato stutter only reinforce our isolation. There is so little patience for the silence from which words emerge or for the silence that is between words and within them.
Meister Eckhart said that there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence.
French poet René Char: “Intensity is silent, its image is not. I love everything that dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me.” Here is an image of silence as the force that discloses hidden depth. Silence is the sister of the divine. One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.
The Greeks believed that when you dreamed at night, the figures of your dreams were characters who left your body, went out into the world, and undertook their own adventures; they then returned before you awoke. At the deepest level of the human heart, there is no simple, singular self. Deep within, there is a gallery of different selves. Each one of these figures expresses a different part of your nature.
When people discover their own complexity, they become afraid, and with the hammers of secondhand thoughts they beat this rich internal landscape into a monoscape. They make themselves conform. They agree to fit in; they cease to be vivid presences, even to themselves.
It is startling that we desperately hold on to what makes us miserable. Our own woundedness becomes a source of perverse pleasure and fixes our identity. We do not want to be cured, for that would mean moving into the unknown.
Rilke used to say that difficulty is one of the greatest friends of the soul. Our lives would be immeasurably enriched if we could but bring the same hospitality in meeting the negative as we bring to the joyful and pleasurable. In avoiding the negative, we only encourage it to recur. We need a new way of understanding and integrating the negative. The negative is one of the closest friends of your destiny. It contains essential energies that you need and that you cannot find elsewhere.
One encouraging aspect of the negative is its truthfulness. The negative does not lie. It will tell you clearly where you court absence rather than inhabit presence. On entering your solitude, one of the first presences to announce itself is the negative. Nietzsche said that one of the best days in his life was the day when he rebaptized all his negative qualities as his best qualities. In this kind of baptism, rather than banishing what is at first glimpse unwelcome, you bring it home to unity with your life. This is the slow and difficult work of self-retrieval. Every person has certain qualities or presences in their heart that are awkward, disturbing, and negative. One of your sacred duties is to exercise kindness toward them. In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualities. Your kindness will slowly poultice their negativity, alleviate their fear, and help them to see that your soul is a home where there is no judgment or febrile hunger for a fixed and limited identity.
The truly lonely element in loneliness is fear.
If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing.
If you keep scraping at the garden, you will never allow anything to grow. People in our hungry modern world are always scraping at the clay of their hearts. They have a new thought, a new plan, a new syndrome, that now explains why they are the way they are. They have found an old memory that opens a new wound. They keep on relentlessly, again and again, scraping the clay away from their own hearts. In nature we do not see the trees, for instance, getting seriously involved in therapeutic analysis of their root systems or the whole stony world that they had to avoid on their way to the light. Each tree grows in two directions at once, into the darkness and out to the light with as many branches and roots as it needs to embody its wild desires.
You cannot dredge the depths of the soul with the meagre light of self-analysis. The inner world never reveals itself cheaply. Perhaps analysis is the wrong way to approach our inner dark.
It is a lonely experience to be at the deathbed of someone who is full of regret; to hear him say how he would love another year to do the things his heart had always dreamed of but believed he could never do until he retired. He had always postponed the dream of his heart. There are many people who do not live the lives they desire.
The shape of each soul is different. There is a secret destiny for each person. When you endeavor to repeat what others have done or force yourself into a preset mold, you betray your individuality.
“The longest and most exciting journey is the journey inwards.”
“To grow is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.”
The soul loves risk; it is only through the door of risk that growth can enter.
People have power over us because we give our power away to them.
Where productivity becomes God, each individual is reduced to a function.
You should never belong fully to something that is outside yourself.
If you sell your soul, you ultimately buy a life of misery.
Respectability and security are subtle traps on life’s journey. Those who are drawn to extremes are often nearer to renewal and self-discovery. Those trapped in the bland middle region of respectability are lost without ever realizing it.
“Here lies Jeremy Brown born a man and died a grocer”
“We have moved too quickly to reach here; now we need to wait to give our spirits a chance to catch up with us”
One of the loneliest aspects of time is transience.
is there a place where our vanished days secretly gather? As a medieval mystic asked, “where does the light go when the candle is blown out?” I believe that there is a place where our vanished days secretly gather. The name of that place is memory.
Poem by Czeslwal Milosz on old age called “A New Province”:
I would prefer to be able to say: “I am satiated,
What is given to taste in this life, I have tasted.”
But I am like someone in the window who draws aside a curtain
To look at a feast he does not comprehend.
Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes.
I love Blaise Pascal’s idea that in a difficult time, you should always keep something beautiful in your heart. Perhaps as a poet said, it is beauty that will save us in the end.
Many of our troubles do not belong to us. They are troubles we draw upon ourselves through our gloomy attitude.
Time and again, we miss out on the great treasures in our lives because we are so restless. In our minds we are always elsewhere. We are seldom in the place where we stand and in the time that is now. Many people are haunted by the past, things that they have not done, things that they should have done that they regret not doing. They are prisoners of their past. Other people are haunted by the future; they are anxious and worried about what is coming.
Sometimes the greatest burdens humans carry are the burdens they make for themselves.
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.
The negativity is the force and face of your own death gnawing at your belonging in the world.
Another face of death, another way it expresses itself in our daily experience, is through fear.
When you begin to let go, it is amazing how enriched your life becomes.
When you can name your fear, your fear begins to shrink.
All fear is rooted in the fear of death.
One of the terrifying aspects of life is this unpredictability.
You will never understand death until it comes to your own door.
Each one of us has to go alone.
Hans Georg Gadamer, a wonderful German philosopher, has a lovely phrase: “A horizon is something towards which we journey, but it is also something that journeys along with us.” This is an illuminating metaphor for understanding the different horizons of your own growth. If you are striving to be equal to your destiny and worthy of the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart, then you should be regularly reaching New Horizons. Against this perspective, death can be understood as the final horizon.
In our struggle with the silent and secret companion, death, the crucial battle is the one between the ego and the soul. The ego is the defensive shell we pull around our lives. It is afraid; It is threatened and grasping. It acts in an overly protective way and is very competitive. The soul, on the other hand, has no barriers. As the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “The soul has no limits.” The soul is a Pilgrim journeying towards endless horizons. There are no exclusion areas; The soul suffuses everything. Furthermore, the soul is in touch with the eternal dimension of time and is never afraid of what is yet to come. In a certain sense, the meeting with your own death in the daily forms of failure, pathos, negativity, fear, or destructiveness are actually opportunities to transfigure your ego. These are invitations to move out of that protective, controlling way of being toward an art of being that allows openness and hospitality. To practice this art of being is to come into your soul rhythm. If you come into your soul rhythm, then the final meeting with your physical death need not be threatening or destructive. That final meeting will be the encounter with your own deepest identity, namely, your soul.
All during the course of our lives we struggle to catch up with ourselves. We are so taken up, so busy and distracted, that we cannot dedicate enough time or recognition to the depths within us.
You should never give away your power to a system or to other people. You should hold the poise, balance, and power of your soul within yourself. If no one can keep death away from you, then no one has ultimate power. All power is pretension. No one avoids death. Therefore …. if you learn not to be afraid of your death, then you realize that you do not need to fear anything else either.
So many people are, as Patrick Kavanagh put it, “preparing for life rather than living it.” You only get one chance. You have one journey through life; You cannot repeat even one moment or retrace one footstep. It seems that we are meant to inhabit and live everything that comes towards us. In the underside of life there is the presence of our death. If you really live your life to the full, death will never have power over you.
The eternal comes to us mainly in terms of nothingness and emptiness. Where there is no space, the eternal cannot awaken. Where there is no space, the soul cannot awaken. This is summed up beautifully in a wonderful poem by the Scottish poet Norman McCaig:
Presents
I give you an emptiness,
I give you a plenitude,
Unwrap them carefully.
One’s as fragile as the other
And when you thank me
I’ll pretend not to notice the doubt in your voice
When you say they’re just what you wanted.
Put them on the table by your bed.
When you wake in the morning
they’ll have gone through the door of sleep
into your head. Wherever you go
they’ll go with you and
wherever you are you’ll wonder,
smiling about the fullness
you can’t add to and the emptiness
that you can fill.
Samuel Beckett is a wonderful writer who has meditated deeply on the mystery of death. His little play Breath is only a few minutes long. First, there is the birth cry, then A little breathing, and finally, the sigh of death. This drama synopsize is what happens in our lives. All of Beckett’s works, especially Waiting for Godot, are about that. In other words, because death exists, time is radically relativized. All we do here is invent games to pass the time.
In a certain sense, we are always waiting for the great moment of gathering or belonging, and it always evades us. We are haunted with a deep sense of absence. There is something missing from our lives. We always expect it to be filled by a definite person, object, or project. We are desperate to fill this emptiness, but the soul tells us, if we listen to it, that this absence can never be failed.
In Connemara the graveyards are near the ocean, where there is a lot of sandy soil. To open the grave, the sod is cut on three sides. It is rolled back very carefully from the surface of the field, but it is not broken off. Then the coffin is put down. The prayers are said and the grave is blessed and filled. Then the sod is rolled out over the grave so that it fits exactly over the opening. A friend of mine calls it “a cesarean section in reverse.” It is as if the womb of the earth, without being broken, is receiving back the individual who once left as a clay shape to live in separation above in the world. It is an image of homecoming, of being taken back completely again.
I don’t want to end up having simply visited this world.
-Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes”.
A Morning Offering – Pat O’Donohue (John’s brother)
I blessed the night that nourished my heart
to set the ghosts of longing free
into the flow and figure of dream
that went to harvest from the dark
bread for the hunger no one sees.
All that is eternal in me
welcomes the wonder of this day,
the field of brightness it creates
offering time for each thing
to arise and illuminate.
I place on the altar of dawn:
the quiet loyalty of breath,
the tent of thought where I shelter,
And all the beauty drawn to the eye.
Made my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
that invites me to new frontiers,
to break the dead shell of yesterdays,
to risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
to live the life that I would love,
to postpone my dream no longer
but to do at last what I came here for
and waste my heart on fear no more.