Showing posts with label john o'donohue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label john o'donohue. Show all posts

Saturday, March 16, 2024

the haunted room






In Ireland there are many stories of haunted houses.  
There may be a room in which one senses a presence 
or hears footsteps or a strange voice.  Such haunted places 
remain uninhabited.  People are afraid to go there. 
 The place is forsaken and left to deepen ever further 
into the shadow of itself.  
 
The way you think about your life can turn your soul into a haunted room. 
 You are afraid to risk going in there anymore.  Your fantasy
 peoples this room of the heart with sad presences, 
 which ultimately become disturbing and sinister. 
 
 The haunted room in the mind installs lonesomeness at the heart of your life.
  It would be devastating in the autumn of your life to look back
 and recognize that you had created a series of haunted rooms
 in your heart.  
 
Fear and negativity are immense forces,
 which constantly tussle with us.  They long to turn the mansions
 of the soul into a totally haunted house.  These are the living conditions
 for which fear and negativity long, and in which they thrive. 
 
 We were sent here to live life to the full.  When you manage to be generous
 in your passion and vulnerability, life always comes to bless you.
  Had you but the courage to acknowledge the haunted inner room,
 turn the key, and enter, you would encounter nothing strange or sinister there. 
 
 You would meet some vital self of yours that you had banished 
during a time of pain or difficulty.  Sometimes, when life squeezes you
 into lonely crevices, you may have to decide between survival or breaking apart.
 At such times, you can be harsh with yourself and settle to be someone
 other than who you really long to be.  At such a time, 
you can do nothing else; you have to survive. 
 
 But your soul always remains faithful to your longing
 to become who you really are.  The banished self from an earlier 
time of life remains within you waiting to be released and integrated. 
 The soul has its own logic of loyalty and concealment.
 
  Ironically, it is usually in its most awkward rooms that the special blessings 
and healing are locked away. 
 
 Your thinking can also freeze and falsify
 the flow of your life’s continuity to make you a prisoner
 of routine and judgement.




~  John O’Donohue, 
from  'Eternal Echoes

Thursday, March 14, 2024

the mystery









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?
(if not I)



~ Amairgen 
(chief poet of the Milesians,)
from Anam Cara, by John O'Donohue

This poem is ascribed to Amergin,
 a Milesian prince or druid who settled in Ireland
 hundreds of years before Christ 
and is from the Leabhar Gabhala, 
or Book of Invasions.

"The three short pieces of verse ascribed to Amergin are certainly very ancient
 and very strange. But as the whole story of the Milesian Invasion
 is wrapped in mystery and is quite possibly a rationalized account
 of early Irish mythology no faith can be placed in the alleged date
 or genuineness of Amergin's verses. They are of interest, because
 as Irish tradition has them as being the first verses made in Ireland, 
so it may very well be they actually do present the oldest surviving
 lines of any vernacular tongue in Europe except Greece."

 by Douglas Hyde, The Story of Early Gaelic Literature
 © by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes



Sunday, March 10, 2024

Matins







1
Somewhere, out at the edges, the night
Is turning and the waves of darkness
Begin to brighten on the shore of dawn

The heavy dark falls back to earth
And the freed air goes wild with light,
The heart fills with fresh, bright breath
And thoughts stir to give birth to color.

2
I arise today

In the name of Silence
Womb of the Word,
In the name of Stillness
Home of Belonging,
In the name of the Solitude
Of the Soul and the Earth.

I arise today

Blessed by all things,
Wings of breath,
Delight of eyes,
Wonder of whisper,
Intimacy of touch,
Eternity of soul,
Urgency of thought,
Miracle of health,
Embrace of God.

May I live this day

Compassionate of heart,
Clear of word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.



~ John O'Donohue
from To Bless the Space Between Us




Tuesday, January 23, 2024

addicted to the external







It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through our voices, we bring out sound from the mountain beneath our soul. These sounds are words. There are so many talking all the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on radio, in the paper, in books. The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us. We take each others’ sounds and make patterns and predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies. Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the ‘world’ together. Yet the uttering of the world reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings out sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.

Humans are new here. Above us, the galaxies dance out toward infinity. Under our feet is the ancient earth. We are beautifully molded from this clay. Yet the smallest stone is millions of years older than us. In your thoughts, the silent universe seeks echo.

An unknown world aspires towards reflection. Words are the oblique mirrors which hold your thought. You gaze into these word mirrors and catch glimpses of meaning, belonging shelter. Behind their bright surfaces is the dark and the silence. Words are like the god Janus, they face inwards and outwards at once.

If we become addicted to the external our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of your inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is natural; to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.

Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world.

Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace.





~ John O'Donohue
from Anam Cara




Sunday, December 31, 2023

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.



~ John O'Donohue

where new beginning might be ripening

 







Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved 
when we place profound trust in the act of beginning. 
Risk might be our greatest ally. 
To live a truly creative life, we always need to cast a critical look
 at where we presently are, attempting always to discern 
where we have become stagnant and where new beginning might be ripening.
 There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable 
to what is new and different. I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth
 that was not rewarded a thousand times over.


There are days when Conamara is wreathed in blue Tuscan light. 
The mountains seem to waver as though they were huge dark ships 
on a distant voyage. I love to climb up into the silence
of these vast autonomous structures. What seems like a pinnacled summit
 from beneath becomes a level plateau when you arrive there.
 Born in a red explosion of ascending fire, the granite lies cold, 
barely marked by the millions of years of rain and wind. 
On this primeval ground I feel I have entered into a pristine permanence,
 a continuity here that knew the wind hundreds of millions of years
 before a human face ever felt it.

When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. 
All our beginnings happen within this continuity. 
Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages
 into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. 
We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point
 along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. 
Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced… 
We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time.
 A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth 
that are stored up for us. 
To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.

Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.



~ John O'Donohue



Thursday, December 21, 2023

To learn from animal being

 






Nearer to the earth's heart, 
Deeper within its silence:
Animals know this world
In a way we never will.

We who are ever
Distanced and distracted
By the parade of bright
Windows thought opens;
Their seamless presence
Is not fractured thus.

Stranded between time
Gone and time emerging,
We manage seldom
To be where we are:
Whereas they are always
Looking our from
The here and now.

May we learn to return 
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.

May we enter 
Into lightness of spirit,
And slip frequently into
The feel of the wild.

Let the clear silence 
Of our animal being
Cleanse our hearts
Of corrosive words.

May we learn to walk
Upon the earth
With all their confidence
And clear-eyed stillness
So that our minds
Might be baptized
In the name of the wind
And the light and the rain.




~ John O'Donohue
from To Bless the Space Between Us




on meeting

 








With respect
And reverence
That the unknown
Between us
Might flower
Into discovery
And lead us
Beyond
The familiar field
Blind with the weed
Of weariness
And the old walls
Of habit.




~ John O'Donohue
from To Bless the Space Between Us




Friday, November 3, 2023

blessing for the interim time

 






When near the end of day, life has drained
Out of light, and it is too soon
For the mind of night to have darkened things,

No place looks like itself, loss of outline
Makes everything look strangely in-between,
Unsure of what has been, or what might come.

In this wan light, even trees seem groundless.
In a while it will be night, but nothing
Here seems to believe the relief of darkness.

You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.

The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.

The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.”

You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk,
Your eyes are blurred;
And there is no mirror.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust;
You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free
From all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here in your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.





~ John O’Donohue
from To Bless the Space Between Us


Sunday, August 27, 2023

now is the time








Now is the time to free the heart,
Let all intentions and worries stop,
Free the joy inside the self,
Awaken to the wonder of your life.

Open your eyes and see the friends
Whose hearts recognize your face as kin,
Those whose kindness watchful and near,
Encourages you to live everything here.

See the gifts the years have given,
Things your effort could never earn,
The health to enjoy who you want to be
And the mind to mirror mystery.



~ John O'Donohue
from To Bless the Space Between Us


Households, cities, countries, and nations have enjoyed great happiness
 when a single individual has taken heed of the Good and Beautiful. . . .
 Such people not only liberate themselves;
 they fill those they meet with a free mind. 

~  Philo

Sunday, July 9, 2023

wildly and dangerously free








It is a strange and magical fact to be here, 
walking around in a body, 
to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. 

It is an immense privilege, 
and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here … 

It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us 
so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. 
We are here. 
We are wildly and dangerously free.





~ John O'Donohue
from Anam Cara




Sunday, June 25, 2023

shoreline of the magnificent

 
 
 
 

 

The visible world is only the shoreline of the magnificent
ocean of the invisible. The invisible is not empty, but is
textured and tense with presences [energies]. These
presences cannot be named; they can only be sensed, not seen.

When you name a dimension of your experience, one of your
qualities or difficulties...you give it an identity. It then responds
to you according to the tone of its name...

The wildness of the invisible world is nameless. It has no name.
A first step towards reawakening respect for your inner life
may be to become aware of the private collage of dead names
you have for your inner life. 
 
Often the experiences of
wilderness can return us to the nameless wildness within.
Sometimes, go away to a wild place of your own. Leave
your name and the grid of intentions and projects and images
which mark you out as citizen Z. Leave it all and let yourself
just slip back into the rhythms of your intimate wildness.[rhythm]
 
You will be surprised at the lost terrains, wells, and mountains
that you will rediscover, territories which have been buried
under well-meant but dead names. To go beyond confinement
is to rediscover yourself.
 
 
 
 


John O'Donohue
from Eternal Echoes
with thanks to Mystic Meandering
 
 
 
 

Thursday, May 4, 2023

into unity and belonging







... there is a mirror within the human mind. 
 This mirror collects every reflection. Human solitude is so unsolitary.
 Deep human solitude is a place of great affinity and of tension. 
When you come into your solitude, you come into companionship 
with everything and everyone. When you extend yourself frenetically outward, 
seeking refuge in your external image or role, you are going into exile.
 When you come patiently and silently home to yourself, 
you come into  unity and into belonging.



~ John O'Donohue
art by Shanna Strauss




Sunday, March 19, 2023

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



Saturday, March 11, 2023

from you







From you
I don't want anything new
no more gifts
nor the scent of landscapes
rising to fill us, 
no bouquets of insight
left by my head
in the tenderness of morning,

no intoxication 
of thoughts that open horizons
where rooms are low,
nor the sever of spring
under the grid of old worlds
that has set on our skin,
nor my favorite blue,
the cobalt 
colour of silence.

No.
All I want
is your two hands
pulsing in mine,
the two of us
back in a circle
round our love.





~ John O'Donohue





our inner worlds







We assume too readily that we share the one world with other people... 
It is true at the objective level that we inhabit the same physical space as other humans; 
the sky is, after all, the one visual constant that unites everyone's perception of being in the world... 

At a deeper level, each person is the custodian of a completely private, individual world...
when people come to visit you, they bring all of their inner worlds,...
their lives are not elsewhere; they are totally there with you, before you, reaching out toward you. 
 When the visit is over, their bodies stand up, walk out, and carry this hidden world away. 

 This recognition also illuminates the mystery of making love. 
It is not just two bodies that are close, but rather two worlds: 
they circle each other and flow into each other. 
We are capable of such beauty, delight, and terror 
because of this infinite and unknown world within us.





~ John O'Donohue
art by Norval Morrisseau


Friday, March 10, 2023

in the beginning was the dream









In the beginning was the dream.
  In the eternal night where no dawn broke, the dream deepened.
  Before anything ever was, it had to be dreamed.  
Everything had its beginning in possibility.  
Every single thing is somehow the expression and incarnation 
of a thought.  If a thing had never been thought, 
it could never be.  If we take Nature as the great artist of longing
 then all presences in the world have emerged from her mind 
and imagination.  We are children of the earth's dreaming. 
  When you compare the silent, under-night of Nature
 with the detached and intimate intensity of the person, 
it is almost as if Nature is in dream and we are her children 
who have broken through the dawn into time and place. 

  Fashioned in the dreaming of the clay,
 we are always somehow haunted by that;
 we are unable ever finally to decide what is dream
 and what is reality.  Each day we live in what we call reality. 
 Yet the more we think about it, the more life seems to resemble a dream.

  We rush through our days in such stress and intensity,
 as if we were here to stay,  and the serious project of the world 
depended on us.  We worry and grow anxious; 
 we magnify trivia until they have become important enough
 to control our lives.  Yet all the time, we have forgotten
 that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet
 spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos. 

 There is no protective zone around any of us. 
 Anything can happen to anyone at any time.  
There is no definitive dividing line between reality and dream.  
What we consider real is often precariously dreamlike.
  One of the linguistic philosophers said that there is no evidence
 that could be employed to disprove this claim:  
The world only came into existence ten minutes ago
 complete with all our memories.  Any evidence you could proffer
 could still be accounted for by the claim.  Because our grip
 on reality is tenuous, every heart is infused
 with the dream of belonging.



~ John O' Donohue
 from 'Eternal Echoes'
 art by Erté.




Friday, February 17, 2023

there is a kindness








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 Connemara, 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 diffusion's 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
photo by Ami Vitale






Wednesday, November 23, 2022

a deeper generosity










Forgiveness is one of the really difficult things in life.  
The logic of receiving hurt seems to run in the direction of never forgetting
 either the hurt or the hurter.  When you forgive, some deeper, 
divine generosity takes you over.  When you can forgive, then you are free.  

When you cannot forgive, you are a prisoner of the hurt done to you.  
If you are really disappointed in someone and you become embittered, 
you become incarcerated inside that feeling.  Only the the grace of forgiveness 
can break the straight logic of hurt and embitterment.  It gives you a way out,
 because it places the conflict on a completely different level.  In a strange way,
 it keeps the whole conflict human.  You begin to see and understand the conditions, 
circumstances, or weakness that made the other person act as she did.

...

Why are we so reluctant to leave our inner prisons?  
There is the security of the confinement and limitation that we know.  
We are often willing to endure the searing sense of forsakenness and distance
 which limitation brings rather than risking the
 step out into the field of the unknown. 




~ John O'Donohue
from Eternal Echoes
art by Leah Dorion




Monday, July 18, 2022

it offers itself so graciously to our hearts







…. We do have a deadening desire to reduce the mystery, the uncertainty of our lives…. 
We bind our lives in solid chains of forced connections that block and fixate us. …. 
Our sense of uncertainty and our need for security nail our world down. …. 
 
Each time we go out, the world is open and free;
 it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome
 from it each day. It is a travesty of possibility and freedom to think
 we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street,
 the one right way is all that is allotted to us. 
Certainty is a subtle destroyer.

We confine our mystery within the prison of routine and repetition. 
One of the most deadening forces of all is repetition. 
Your response to the invitation and edge of your life becomes reduced 
to a series of automatic reflexes. For example, you are so used to getting up
 in the morning and observing the morning rituals of washing and dressing.
 You are still somewhat sleepy, your mind is thinking of things you have to do
 in the day that lies ahead. You go through these first gestures of the morning
 often without even noticing that you are doing them. This is a disturbing
 little image, because it suggests that you live so much of your one life
with the same automatic blindness of adaptation.

… Habit is a strong invisible prison.
 Habits are styles of feeling, perception, 
or action that have now become second nature to us.
 A habit is a sure cell of predictability; it can close you off from the unknown,
 the new, and the unexpected. You were sent to the earth to become a receiver
 of the unknown. From ancient times, these gifts were prepared for you; 
now they come towards you across eternal distances. 
Their destination is the altar of your heart. 





~ John O’Donohue
from Eternal Echoes


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