a blessing

.

May the light of your soul guide you.

May the light of your soul bless the work you do 
with the secret love and warmth of your heart.

May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul.

May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light, 
and renewal to those who work with you 
and to those who see and receive your work.

May your work never weary you.

May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment,
 inspiration, and excitement.

May you be present in what you do.

May you never become lost in the bland absences.

May the day never burden.

May dawn find you awake and alert, 
approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities, and promises.

May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.

May you go into the night blessed, sheltered. and protected.

May your soul calm, console, and renew you.

.

~ John O'Donohue

(John said, "the soul is not in the body;
 rather the body is to be found in the soul.)

.

noninterference and surrender

On a farm you learn to respect nature, 

particularly for the wisdom of its dark underworld.  

When you sow things in the spring, 

you commit them to the darkness of the soil.  

The soil does its own work.  

It is destructive to interfere with the rhythm and wisdom of its darkness.  

You sow drills of potatoes on Tuesday and you are delighted with them.  

You meet someone on a Wednesday who says 

that you spread the potatoes too thickly, you will have no crop.  

You dig up the potatoes again and spread them more thinly.  

On the following Monday, you meet an agricultural advisor who says 

this particular variety of seed potatoes needs to be spread close together.

  

You dig them up again and set them closer to each other.  

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...

It is wise to allow the soul to carry on its secret work in the night side of your life.  

You might not see anything stirring for a long time.  

You might have only the slightest intimations 

of the secret growth that is happening within you, 

but these intimations are sufficient.

~ John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

haunted pilgrims

Fashioned from clay, we carry the memory of the earth. 

Ancient, forgotten things stir within our hearts, 

memories from the time before the mind was born.

 

Within us are depths that keep watch.

These are depths that no words can trawl or light unriddle. 

Our neon times have neglected and evaded the depth-kingdoms

 of interiority in favor of the ghost realms of cyberspace. 

We have unlearned the patience and attention of lingering at the thresholds 

where the unknown awaits us. We have become haunted pilgrims 

addicted to distraction and driven by the speed and color of images.

~ John O'Donohue

from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

without an image of ourselves

Procrustes was a host who adjusted his guests to their bed.
Procrustes, whose name means "he who stretches."

He kept a house by the side of the road where he offered hospitality to passing strangers, who were invited in for a pleasant meal and a night's rest in his very special bed. Procrustes described it as having the unique property that its length exactly matched whomsoever lay down upon it. What Procrustes didn't volunteer was the method by which this "one-size-fits-all" was achieved, namely as soon as the guest lay down Procrustes went to work upon him, stretching him on the rack if he was too short for the bed and chopping off his legs if he was too long. Theseus turned the tables on Procrustes, fatally adjusting him to fit his own bed.


We are no sooner out of the womb than we must begin this precarious unfolding

 and shaping of who we are. If we have bad or destructive times in childhood, 

we begin to fix on a survival identity to cover over and to compensate 

for what happens to us. If we are never encouraged to be ourselves 

we begin to construct an identity that will gain us

 either attention or approval. 

 When we set out to construct our lives according to a fixed image, 

we damage ourselves. The image becomes the desperate focus 

of all our longing. 

 There are no frames for the soul. In truth, we are called,

in so far as we can, to live without an image of ourselves,

 or at least to keep images we have free and open.

 When you sense the immensity of the unknown within you, 

any image you have built of yourself gradually loses its promise. 

 Your name, your face, your address only suggest the threshold of your identity.

 Somehow you are always secretly aware of this.

 Sometimes. you find yourself listening to someone 

telling you what you should do 

or describing what is going on inside you,

 and you whisper to yourself that they 

have not the foggiest idea who you actually are.




~ John O'Donohue
from Eternal Echoes

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

our invisible prisons

…. 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

.

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

wild elegance

Beauty invites us towards profound elegance of soul.
 It reminds us that we are heirs to elegance and nobility of spirit 
and encourages us to awaken the divinity within us.  
We are no longer trapped in mental frames of self-reduction or self-denunciation.

Instead, we feel the desire to celebrate, to give ourselves over 
to the dance of joy and delight.   The overwhelming beauty 
which is God pervades the texture of our soul, transforming all smallness, 
limitation and self-division.  The mystics speak of the excitement of such unity. 
 This is how Marguerite Porete describes it: 

 'Such a Soul, says Love swims in the sea of joy, that is in the sea of delights,
 flowing and running out of the Divinity.  And so she feels no joy,
 for she is joy itself.  She swims and flows in Joy...
 for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her.'   

When we acknowledge the wild beauty of God, we begin to glimpse
 the potential holiness of our neglected wildness.  As humans,
 citizens and believers, we have become domesticated beyond belief.  
We have fallen out of rhythm with our natural wildness.  
What we now call 'being wild' is often misshapen, destructive and violent.
  The natural wildness as the fluency of the soul at one with beauty is foreign to us.  

The call of the wild is a call to the elemental levels of the soul,
 the places of intuition, kinship, swiftness, fluency and the consolation 
of the lonesome that is not lonely.  Our fear of our own wildness 
derives in part from our fear of the formless; but the wild is not the formless
 - it holds immense refinement and, indeed, clarity. 
 The wild has a profound simplicity that carries none of the false burdens 
of brokenness or self-conflict; it flows naturally as one,
 elegant and seamless.  

~ John O'Donohue

from The Invisible Embrace, Beauty

the inner landscape of beauty

 

~ John O'Donohue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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