tender presence

.

May you know that absence is full of tender presence and

that nothing is forgotten.

May the absences in your life be full of eternal echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere which

holds the presences that have left your life.

May you be generous in your embrace of loss.

May the sore well of grief turn into a well of seamless

presence.

May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear

from and may you have the courage to speak out for

the excluded ones.

May you become the gracious and passionate subject of

your own life.

May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle

words or false belonging.

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight

are one, and may your belonging inhabit its deepest

dreams within the shelter of the Great Belonging.

.

John O'Donohue
 from eternal echoes

.

clear of the sticky web of the personal

.

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

from To Bless the Space Between Us

the nativity

 

 

 

 

 

No man reaches where the moon touches a woman.
Even the moon leaves her when she opens
Deeper into the ripple in her womb
That encircles dark to become flesh and bone.

Someone is coming ashore inside her.
A face deciphers itself from water
And she curves around the gathering wave,
Opening to offer the life it craves.

In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers,
She falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.
A red wire of pain feeds through every vein
Until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.

Outside each other now, she sees him first.
Fresh of her flesh, her dreamt son safe on earth. 

 

 

 

 

~ John O'Donohue

from  Conamara Blues

art by Gustav Klimt 

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

.

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 out 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 light and the rain.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

good to be

 

 

 

 Keb' Mo'

 

 

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, relativised 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

 with thanks to whiskey river

 

 

inviting you to be generous

Wonder, as the child of mystery, is a natural source of prayer.  

One of the most beautiful forms of prayer is the prayer of appreciation.
  This prayer arises out of the recognition of the gracious kindness of creation.
  We have been given so much.  We could never have merited or earned it.
  When you appreciate all you are and all you have, 
you can celebrate and enjoy it. 

 You realize how fortunate you are. 
 Providence is blessing you and inviting you to be generous with your gifts.
  You are able to bless life and give thanks to God. 
 The prayer of appreciation has no agenda but gracious thanks.
  Nothing is given to you for yourself alone.  
When you receive some blessing or gift, 
you do it in the name of others;
 through you, they, too, will come to share
 in the kindness of Providence.

~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

on being

 

 

 

 

 

~ John O'Donohue

 

 

 

 

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

what makes us miserable

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. 

 Often it seems we are destructively addicted to the negative.  

What we call the negative is usually the surface form of contradiction. 

 If we maintain our misery at this surface level, we hold off 

the initially threatening but ultimately redemptive and healing

 transfiguration that comes through engaging our inner contradiction. 

 We need to revalue what we consider to be negative.

  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... 

 

The negative threatens us so powerfully

 precisely because it is an invitation to an art of compassion

 and self-enlargement that our small thinking utterly resists. 

 

 Your vision is your home, and your home should have many mansions 

to shelter your wild divinity.  Such integration respects

 the multiplicity of selves within.  

~ John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

photo by edmund teske

let this weather of feeling pass

 

 

 

 

In your clay body, things are coming to expression 

and to light that were never known before, 

presences that never came to light or shape in any other individual.

 

  To paraphrase Heidegger, who said, "Man is a shepherd of being," 

  we could say, "Man is a shepherd of clay." 

 

 You represent an unknown world that begs you to bring it to voice.

  Often the joy you feel does not belong to your individual biography

 but to the clay our of which you are formed.  

 

At other times, you will find sorrow moving through you, 

like a dark mist over a landscape.   

This sorrow is dark enough to paralyze you. 

 

 It is a mistake to interfere with this movement of feeling. 

 It is more appropriate to recognize that this emotion

 belongs more to your clay than to your mind. 

 

 It is wise to let this weather of feeling pass;

 it is on its way elsewhere.

 

 Regardless of how modern we seem, we still remain ancient,

 sisters and brothers of the one clay. 

 In each of us a different part of the mystery becomes luminous. 

 To truly be and become yourself,  

you need the ancient radiance of others.

 

 

 

 

~ John O'Donohue

 

 

 

 

.

gentleness helps

When suffering comes, we feel panic and fear.  

Frightened, we want to hide.  

You want to climb up on to some high ledge

 to escape the dismemberment of this acidic tide. 

 Yet the strange thing is: the more you resist, the longer it stays.

  The more intensely you endeavor to depart the ground of pain, 

the more firmly you remain fixed there. 

 

 It is difficult to be gentle with yourself when you are suffering.  

Gentleness helps you to stop resisting the pain that is visiting you.

 

  When you stop resisting suffering, something else begins to happen. 

 You begin slowly to allow your suffering to follow its own logic.

  The assumption here is that suffering does not visit you gratuitously. 

 There is in suffering some hidden shadowed light. 

 Destiny has a perspective on us and our pathway

 that we can never fully glimpse;

 it alone knows why suffering comes.  

 Suffering has its own reasoning.  

It wants to teach us something. 

 When you stop resisting its dark work, 

you are open to learning what it wants to show you. 

 

 Often, we learn most deeply and receive profoundly from the black,

 lonely tide of pain.  We often see in Nature how pruning strengthens. 

 Fruit trees look so wounded after being pruned, 

yet the limitation of this cutting forces the tree to fill and flourish. 

  Similarly with drills of potatoes when they are raised, 

earth is banked up around them and seems to smother them. 

 Yet as the days go by the stalks grow stronger.  

Suffering can often become a time of pruning.  

Though it is sore and cuts into us,

 later we may become aware that this dark suffering

 was secretly a liturgy of light and growth. 

~ John O'Donohue

from: Eternal Echoes
art by Klimt

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

tribute to John O'Donohue

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

Blessing

Blessed be the longing that brought you here and that quicken your soul with wonder.
May you have the courage to befriend your eternal longing.
May you enjoy the critical and creative companionship of the question "Who am I?" and may it brighten your longing.
May a secret Providence guide your thought and shelter your feeling.
May your mind inhabit your life with the same sureness with which your body belongs to the world.
May the sense of something absent enlarge your life.
May your soul be as free as the ever-new waves of the sea.
May you succumb to the danger of growth.
May you live in the neighborhood of wonder.
May you belong to love with the wildness of Dance.
May you know that you are ever embraced in the kind circle of God.





~ John O'Donohue

 

real presence is the ideal

Real presence is the ideal of all true individuation.  When we yield to helplessness, 
we strengthen the hand of those who would destroy.  When we choose indifference, 
we betray our world.  Yet the world is not decided by action alone. 

 It is decided more by consciousness and spirit; they are the secret sources of all action
 and behavior.  The spirit of a time is an incredibly subtle, yet hugely powerful force. 
 And it is comprised of the mentality and spirit of all individuals together. 

 Therefore, the way you look at things is not simply a private matter.  
Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on.  When you give in
 to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it.  When you take back
 your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, 
your creativity awakens and flows...

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us
art: Herzeloyde – The Mother Archetype

near

When the soul leaves the body, it is no longer under the burden 
and control of space and time.  The soul is free; 
 distance and separation hinder it no more.  

The dead are our nearest neighbors; they are all around us. 
 Meister Eckhart was once asked, Where does the soul of a person go
 when the person dies?  He said, no place.  Where else would the soul be going?
  Where else is the eternal world?  It can be nowhere other than here. 

 We have falsely spatialized the eternal world.  We have driven the eternal 
out into some kind of distant galaxy.  Yet the eternal world 
does not seem to be a place but rather a different state of being.  

The soul of the person goes no place because there is no place else to go. 
 This suggests that the dead are here with us, in the air that we are
 moving through all the time.  

The only difference between us the the dead
 is that they are now in an invisible form  You cannot see them 
with the human eye.  But you can sense the presence of those you love
who have died.  With the refinement of your soul, 
you can sense them.  You feel that they are near.

~ John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

art by Roderick Maclver

roguish smile of a joyful god

Every day of your life joy is waiting for you, 
hidden at the heart of the significant things which happen to you
 or secretly around the corner of quieter things. If your heart loves delight,
 you will always be able to discover the quiet joy that awaits
 to shine forth in many situations. 

Prayer should help us develop the habit of delight. 
We weight the notion of prayer with burdens of duty,
 holiness and the struggle for perfection. Prayer should have the freedom of delight.
 It should arise from and bring us to humour, laughter, and joy.
 Religion often suffers from a great amnesia; it constantly insists
 on the seriousness of God and forgets 
the magic of the divine glory. 

Prayer should be the wild dance of the heart, too.
 In the silence of our prayer we should be able to sense the roguish smile
 of a joyful god who, despite all the chaos and imperfection, 
ultimately shelters everything.

~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

extending and deepening

I think that each of us has a huge pre-life -
 a life that we have before we ever show up physically on the planet.
 And I think that hundreds of thousands of years of imagination and dreaming
 at the divine level went into the creation of the masterpiece that is each individuality.

And if you look at individuals - I mean, there is a different world hidden
 behind each human face. So each one of us carries a unique narrative, 
a unique memory. And different possibilities sleep in the clay of our hearts.
 So individuality is never repetitious or repeated.

So that must mean in the great circle of belonging that you have something
 special to do in the universe which can be done by no one else but you. 
If somebody else could do it, they’d be here and you wouldn't be here.

So I think that one of the fascinating things about identity
 is exactly this dialectic of destiny, which sets the outer frame of your life, 
and freedom which fills its inner form. And I think each of us in every moment
 of our experience are really extending and deepening that secret and subtle narrative.

~ John O'Donohue