the unknown self

So much of what delights and troubles you

Happens on a surface

You take for ground.

Your mind thinks your life alone,

Your eyes consider air your nearest neighbor,

Yet it seems that a little below your heart

There houses in you an unknown self

Who prefers the patterns of the dark

And is not persuaded by the eye's affection

Or caught by the flash of thought.

It is a self that enjoys contemplative patience

With all your unfolding expression,

Is never drawn to break into light

Though you entangle yourself in unworthiness

And misjudge what you do and who you are.

It presides within like an evening freedom

That will often see you enchanted by twilight

Without ever recognizing the falling night,

It resembles the under-earth of your visible life:

All you do and say and think is fostered

Deep in its opaque and prevenient clay.

It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease

That is not ruffled by disappointment;

It presides in a deeper current of time

Free from the force of cause and sequence

That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,

Its dark light might quench your mind,

For it knows how your primeval heart

Sisters every cell of your life

To all your known mind would avoid,

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,

Offering you only discrete glimpses

Of how you construct your life.

At times, it will lead you strangely,

Magnetized by some resonance

That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night

As the poet who draws your dreams,

Creating for you many secret doors,

Decorated with pictures of your hunger;

It has the dignity of the angelic

That knows you to your roots,

Always awaiting your deeper befriending

To take you beyond the threshold of want,

Where all your diverse strainings

Can come to wholesome ease.

~ John O'Donohue

art by Gedő, Ilka

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an ancient voice

...behind this outer facade, another life is going on in you. The mind and heart are wanderers who are always tempted by new horizons.   Your life belongs in a visible, outer consistency; your inner life is nomadic.  Hegel says, "just this unrest that is the Self."  Your longing frequently takes you on inner voyages that no one would ever guess.  Longing is the deepest and most ancient voice in the human soul.  It is the secret source of all presence, and the driving force of all creativity and imagination: longing keeps the door open and calls towards us the gifts and blessings which our lives dream.

...longing is a quality of desire which distance or duration evokes.  In other words, your longing reaches out into the distance to unite you with whatever or whomsoever your heart desires.  Longing awakens when there is a feeling that someone or something is away from you.  It is interesting that the word "desire" comes from the Latin "desiderare," which originally meant "to cease to see."  This suggested a sense of absence and the desire to seek and find the absent one. Deep down, we desire to come back into the intimate unity of belonging.

~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

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nets

Our love is

a sister of the light;

deftly, she unwinds

our shadowed nets.

Where they become

keening shawls

to shelter loss,

she pours oil of ease.

From underneath

she rips the knots,

the mass of algae dream

unties and drops.

And the reeds 

woven to cover

fear of the deep,

drift and slip.

Lines of empty eyes

that caught and held

everything blindly,

surge and see.

Water

urges us

to fluency.

~ John O'Donohue

from Echoes of Memory

photo from cog arts culture

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gleninagh

The dark inside us is sistered outside

in night which dislikes the light of the face

and the colours the eye longs to embrace.

Night adores the mountain, wrapped to itself,

a giant heart beating beneath rock and grass

and a mind stilled inside one, sure thought.

Something has broken inside this Spring night,

unconsolably its rain teems unseen

onto Gleninagh Mountain's listening depth.

Next morning the light is cleansed to behold

the glad milk of thirty streams pulse and spurt

out of unknown pores in the mountain's hold.

~ John O'Donohue

from Echoes of Memory

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exposed

November's hunger strips the fields, its thin light

rifles the web and warmth of every nest,

allows the cold day to invade each secret,

absolves the ghosts of leaf that outlast autumn.

Now I can depend less and less on the grace

of spontaneity, talk quickly tires,

words become contrived as the eyes of others

notice my mind unravel in this sallow light.

Intense with silence my room waits for me,

the paintings and open books grown distant,

its window one huge eye on the tree outside;

in the mirror the glimpse of my face draws tears.

~ John O'Donohue

from Echoes of Memory

photo by Christine de Grancy

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deepest prayer

A person should always offer a prayer of graciousness 

for the love that has awakened in them. 

When you feel love for your beloved and his or her love for you, 

now and again you should offer the warmth of your love 

as a blessing for those who are damaged and unloved. 

Send that love out into the world to people who are desperate; 

to those who are starving; to those who are trapped in prison; 

in hospitals and all the brutal terrains of bleak and tormented lives. 

When you send that love out from the bountifulness of your own love, 

it reaches other people. 

This love is the deepest power of prayer.

~ John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

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nowhere

They are to be admired those survivors

of solitude who have gone with no maps

into the room without features,

where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,

no path of danger to a cold summit

to look back on and feel exuberant,

no clarity of territories yet untouched

that tremble near the human breath,

no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores

to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,

no friendship of other explorers

drawn into the dream of the unknown.

No.  They do not belong to the outside worship

of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior

space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,

where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human

and a poultice of silence pulls every sound

out of circulation down into the ground,

where in the panic of being each breath unravels

an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind,

shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost,

where only the red scream of the blood continues unheard

without anonymous skin, and the end of all exploring

is the relentless arrival at an ever novel nowhere.

~ John O'Donohue

from Echoes of Memory

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voyage into the unknown

There is a certain innocence about beginning, with its excitement and promise of something new. But this will emerge only through undertaking some voyage into the unknown. And no one can foretell what the unknown might yield. There are journeys we have begun that have brought us great inner riches and refinement; but we had to travel through dark valleys of difficulty and suffering. Had we known at the beginning what the journey would demand of us, we might never have set out. Yet the rewards and gifts became vital to who we are. Through the innocence of beginning we are often seduced into growth.

… When the heart is ready for a fresh beginning, unforeseen things can emerge. And in a sense, this is exactly what a beginning does. It is an opening for surprises. Surrounding the intention and the act of beginning, there are always exciting possibilities. … beginnings have their own mind, and they invite and unveil new gifts and arrivals in one’s life. Beginnings are new horizons that want to be seen; … What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen?

~ John O’Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

with thanks to http://onespiritinterfaith.org/

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exhausted

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,

Time takes on the strain until it breaks;

Then all the unattended stress falls in

On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.

Things you could take in your stride before

Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.

Gravity begins falling inside you,

Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.

And you are marooned on unsure ground.

Something within you has closed down;

And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.

The desire that drove you has relinquished.

There is nothing else to do now but rest

And patiently learn to receive the self

You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken

And sadness take over like listless weather.

The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;

Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up

To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain

When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,

Taking time to open the well of color

That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone

Until its calmness can claim you.

Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.

Learn to linger around someone of ease

Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,

Having learned a new respect for your heart

And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

art by van gogh

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astir with the harvest of night

May morning be astir with the harvest of night;

Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,

Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse

That cut right through the surface to a source.

May this be a morning of innocent beginning,

When the gift within you slips clear

Of the sticky web of the personal

With its hurt and its hauntings,

And fixed fortress corners,

A Morning when you become a pure vessel

For what wants to ascend from silence,

May your imagination know

The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,

And the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all

The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields

And something original begins

To stir toward your senses

And grow stronger in your heart

In order to come to birth

In a clean line of form,

That claims from time

A rhythm not yet heard,

That calls space to

A different shape.

May it be its own force field

And dwell uniquely

Between the heart and the light

To surprise the hungry eye

By how deftly it fits

About its secret loss.

~ John O'Donohue

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where you are at home

The world of the past has gone... Behold I am making all of creation new.

(Book of Revelations)

The new day deepens what has already happened and unfolds what is surprising, unpredictable, and creative... Presence is the way a person's individuality comes toward you.  Presence is the soul texture of the person... If your soul is awakened, then you realize that this is the house of your real belonging.  Your longing is safe there.  Belonging is related to longing.  If you hyphenate belonging, it yields a lovely axiom for spiritual growth:  Be - Your - Longing.  Longing is a precious instinct in the soul. Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity. You should belong first in your own interiority.  If you belong there, and if you are in rhythm with yourself and connected to that deep, unique source within, then you will never be vulnerable when your outside belonging is qualified, relativized, or taken away.  You will still be able to stand on your own ground, the ground of your soul, where you are not a tenant, where you are at home.

~ John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

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presence in landscape

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rocks,

I am a beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am the wild boar in valour,

I am the salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a world of knowledge,

I am the point of the lance of battle,

I am the God who created the fire in the head.

Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain? 

Who announces the ages of the moon?

Who teaches the place where couches the sun?

~ Amairgen 

(chief poet of the Milesians,

brother of Evir, Ir, and Eremon, the first Milesian 

princes who came to Ireland hundreds of years before Christ)

ed. P. Murray

from Anam Cara, by John O'Donohue

art by Pan Tian Shou

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beneath your chosen path

When the garden of your unchosen lives has enough space to breathe beneath your chosen path, your life enjoys a vitality and a sense of creative tension.  Rilke refers to this as "the repository of unlived things."  You know that you have not compromised the immensity that you carry, and in which you participate.  You have not avoided the call of commitment; yet you hold your loyalty to your chosen path in such a way as to be true to the blessings and dangers of life's passionate sacramentality.  No life is single.  Around and beneath each life is the living presence of these adjacencies.  Often, it is not the fact of our choosing that is vital, but rather the way we hold that choice.  In so far as we can, we should ensure that our chosen path is not a flight from complexity.  If we opt for complacency, we exclude ourselves from the adventure of being human. Where all danger is neutralized, nothing can ever grow.  To keep the borders of choice porous demands critical vigilance and affective hospitality. To live in such a way invites risk and engages complexity.  Life cannot be neatly compartmentalized.  Once the psyche is engaged with such invitation and courage, it is no longer possible to practice tidy psychological housekeeping.  To keep one's views and convictions permeable is to risk the intake of new possibility, which can lead to awkward change.  Yet the integrity of growth demands such courage and vulnerability from us; otherwise the tissues of our sensibility atrophy and we become trapped behind the same predictable mask of behavior.

~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

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clearance in the thicket of thought

In prayer, we come nearest to making a real clearance in the thicket of thought.  Prayer takes thought to a place of stillness. Prayer slows the flow of the mind until we can begin to see with a new tranquility.  In this kind of thought, we become conscious of our divine belonging.  We begin to sense the serenity of this clearing.  We learn that regardless of the fragmentation and turbulence in so many regions of our lives, there is a place in the soul where the voices and prodding of the world never reach.  It is almost like the image of the tree.  The branches can sway and quiver in the wind, the center of the tree, there pertains the stillness of its anchorage.  In prayer, thought returns to its origin in the infinite.  Attuned to its origin, thought reaches below its own netting.  In this way prayer liberates thought from the small rooms where fear and need confine it.  Despite all the negative talk about God, the Divine still remains the one space where thought can become free.  There we will be liberated from the repetitive echoes of our own smallness and blindness... Prayer is the path to the secret belonging at the heart of our other lives.

~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

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tribute to John O'Donohue

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axioms for wildness

Alive to the thrill

Of the wild.

Meet the dawn

On a mountain.

Wash you face

In the morning dew.

Feel the favor of the earth.

Go out naked in the wind,

Your skin

Almost Aeolian.

With the music inside,

Dance like there is no outside.

Become subtle enough

To hear a tree breathe.

Sleep by the ocean,

Letting yourself unfurl

Like the reeds that swirl

Gradually on the sea floor.

Try to watch a painting from within:

How it holds what it never shows.

The mystery of your face,

Showing what you never see.

See your imagination dawn

Around the rim of your world.

Feel the seamless silk of the ocean

Worm you in ancient buoyancy.

Feel the wild imprint of surprise

When you are taken in by your lover's eyes.

Succumb to warmth in the heart

Where divine fire glows.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the space Between Us

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no life is single

.

When the garden of your unchosen lives has enough space to breathe beneath your chosen path, your life enjoys a vitality and sense of creative tension.  Rilke refers to this as "the repository of unlived things."

*

No one lives his life.

Disguised since childhood,

haphazardly assembled

from voices and fears and little pleasures,

we come of age as masks.

Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses

where all these lives are laid away

like suits of armor or old carriages

or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,

to the repository of unlived things.

excerpted from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

*

You know that you have not compromised the immensity that you carry, and in which you participate.  You have not avoided the call of commitment;  yet you hold your loyalty to your chosen path in such a way as to be true to the blessings and dangers in life's passionate sacramentality.  No life is single. Around and beneath each life is the living presence of these adjacencies.... to keep the borders of choice porous demands critical vigilance and affective hospitality.  To live in such a way invites risk and engages complexity.   Yet the integrity of growth demands such courage and vulnerability from us; otherwise the tissues of our sensibility atrophy and we become trapped behind the same predictable mask of behavior. 

.

~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

.

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to be here is immense

.

.

There is a kindness that dwells deep down in things; it presides everywhere, often in the places we least expect. The world can be harsh and negative, but if we remain generous and patient, kindness inevitably reveals itself. Something deep in the human soul seems to depend on the presence of kindness; something instinctive in us expects it, and once we sense it we are able to trust and open ourselves. Here in Conamara, the mountains are terse and dark; left to themselves they would make for a brooding atmosphere. However, everywhere around and in between there are lakes. The surface of these lakes takes on the variations of the surrounding light to create subtle diffusions of color. Thus their presence qualifies the whole landscape with a sense of warmth and imagination. If we did not feel that some ultimate kindness holds sway, we would feel like outsiders confronted on every side by a world toward which we could make no real bridges.


The word kindness has a gentle sound that seems to echo the presence of compassionate goodness. When someone is kind to you, you feel understood and seen. There is no judgment or harsh perception directed toward you. Kindness has gracious eyes; it is not small-minded or competitive; it wants nothing back for itself. Kindness strikes a resonance with the depths of your own heart; it also suggests that your vulnerability, though somehow exposed, is not taken advantage of; rather, it has become an occasion for dignity and empathy. Kindness casts a different light, an evening light that has the depth of color and patience to illuminate what is complex and rich in difference.

Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway. This is the heart of blessing. To believe in blessing is to believe that our being here, our very presence in the world, is itself the first gift, the primal blessing. As Rilke says: Hier zu sein ist so viel — to be here is immense. Nowhere does the silence of the infinite lean so intensely as around the form of a newly born infant. Once we arrive, we enter into the inheritance of everything that has preceded us; we become heirs to the world. To be born is to be chosen. To be created and come to birth is to be blessed. Some primal kindness chose us and brought us through the forest of dreaming until we could emerge into the clearance of individuality, with a path of life opening before us through the world.

The beginning often holds the clue to everything that follows. Given the nature of our beginning, it is no wonder that our hearts are imbued with longing for beauty, meaning, order, creativity, compassion, and love, We approach the world with this roster of longings and expect that in some way the world will respond and confirm our desire. Our longing knows it cannot force the fulfillment of its desire; yet it does instinctively expect that primal benevolence to respond to it. This is the threshold where blessing comes alive.

.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

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the mystery of thereness that we call presence

.

.

There is a lovely, disconcerting moment between sleep and awakening.  You have only half emerged from sleep, and for a few seconds you do not know where you are, who you are, or what you are.  You are lost between worlds.  Then your mind settles, and you recognize the room and you take up your place again in your own life.  And you realize that both you and the world have survived the crossing from night to reality.  It is a new day, and the world is faithfully there again, offering itself to your longing and imagination, stretching out beyond your room to mountains, seas, the countenances behind which other lives hide.  We take our world totally for granted.  It is only when we experience the momentary disturbance of being marooned in such an interim that we grasp what a surprise it is to be here and to have the wild companionship of this world.  Such disturbances awaken us to the mystery of thereness that we call presence.  Often, the first exposure to the one you will love or to a great work of art produces a similar disconcerting confusion.

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Presence is alive.  You sense and feel presence; it comes towards you and engages you.  Landscape has a vast depth and subtlety of presence.  The more attentive you are, and the longer you remain in a landscape, the more you will be embraced by its presence.  Though you may be completely alone there, you know that you are not on your own.  In our relentless quest for human contact, we have forgotten the solace and friendship of Nature.  It is interesting in the Irish language how the word for the elements and the word for desire is the same word: duil. As the term for creation, its accent is on the elemental nature of creation.   Duil suggests a vital elemental-ism.  It also means longing.  "Duil a chur I gceol" means "to get a longing for music."  Duil also holds the sense of expectation and hope.. Could it be that duil originally suggested that human longing was an echo of the elemental vitality of Nature?

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You feel the presence in Nature sometimes in great trees that stand like ancient totem spirits night and day, watching over a landscape for hundreds of years.  Water also has a soothing and seductive presence that draws us towards it.  John Montague writes: "Part order, part wilderness / Water creates its cadenced illusion."  Each shape of water - the well, stream, lake, river and ocean - has a distinctive rhythm of presence.  Stone, too, has a powerful presence.  Michelangelo used to say that sculpture is the art of liberating the shape hidden and submerged in the rock.  I went one morning to visit a sculptor friend.  He showed me a stone and asked if I saw any hidden form in it.  I could not.  Then he pointed out the implicit shape of a bird.  He said, "For ten years I have been passing that stone on the shore and only this morning did I notice the secret shape of the bird."  Whereas human presence is immediate, the presences in landscape are mediate;  they are often silent and indirect.

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~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

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for a time of change

.

The mind of time is hard to read.

We can never predict what it will bring,

Nor even from all that is already gone

Can we say what form it finally takes;

For time gathers its moments secretly.

Often we only know it's time to change

When a force has built inside the heart

That leaves us uneasy as we are.

.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul

Or the love where we once belonged

Calls nothing alive in us anymore.

.

We drift through this gray, increasing nowhere

Until we stand before a threshold we know

We have to cross to come alive once more.

.

May we have the courage to take the step

Into the unknown that beckons us;

Trust that a richer life awaits us there,

That we will lose nothing

But what has already died;

Feel the deeper knowing in us sure

Of all that is about to be born beyond

The pale frames where we stayed confined,

Not realizing how such vacant endurance

Was bleaching our soul's desire.

.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

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