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ETERNAL ECHOES
A BANTAM BOOK: 9780553812411
Originally published in Great Britain by Bantam Press,
a division of Transworld Publishers
PRINTING HISTORY
Bantam Press edition published 1998
Bantam Press edition published 2000
10
Copyright © John O’Donohue 1998
The right of John O’Donohue to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Extracts from poems, entitled ‘Do Mo Ghrā’ and ‘Idir an Paidr
n Pairteach’, by Caitln Maude from Dānta, Coisēim, Dublin, reproduced by kind permission of Cathal ōLuain.
Extracts from Early Irish Poetry translated by Myles Dillon, edited by James Carney, published by Mercier Press, 1965, and reproduced by kind permission of John Dillon.
Extract from ‘Too Many Names’ by Pablo Neruda translated by Alastair Reid, from Selected Poems edited by Nathaniel Tarn, translator Jonathan Cape.
Extract from C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keely and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis is reproduced by kind permission of Hogarth Press on behalf of the Estate of C. P. Cavafy.
Extract from Soul-shrine by Carmina Gadelica, translated by Alexander Carmichael, Floris Books, Edinburgh.
‘Dear Angel of my Birth’ copyright Kathleen Raine. First published in On a Deserted Shore, Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1973; Agenda Editions, 1987.
Extracts from Selected Poems: Fernando Pessoa translated by Jonathan Griffin (Penguin Books 1974, second edition 1982) copyright © L. M. Rosa translations © Jonathan Griffin, 1974, 1982: ‘I Know, I Alone’ (p46, 8 lines) ‘To Be Great, Be Entire’ (p103, 6 lines), ‘I See Goats Moving’ (p49, 2 lines), reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.’ The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
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Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Critical Acclaim
Also by John O’Donohue
Acknowledgements
Prologue
1 Awakening in the World: The Threshold of Belonging
2 Presence: The Flame of Longing
3 Prisons We Choose to Live In
4 Suffering as the Dark Valley of Broken Belonging
5 Prayer: A Bridge between Longing and Belonging
6 Absence: Where Longing Still Lingers
Suggested Further Reading
About the Author
For the ones who inhabit lives
where belonging is torn and
longing is numbed.
ANAM ĊARA
CONAMARA BLUES
ECHOES OF MEMORY
PERSON ALS VERMITTLUNG
BENEDICTUS
I wish to thank: Brenda Kimber and Kate Melhuish, my editors at Transworld; Kim Witherspoon and her agency for her confidence in the work and its effective mediation; Laura Morris and the Abner Stein agency; John Devitt, who read the manuscript and offered a creative and literary critique; Benny Murphy for the excitement of question and conversation; Dr Lelia Doolan, who gave a wonderfully encouraging and rigorous critical response to the text; David Whyte for his brotherly care and our conversations about the world of the imagination; and especially Marian O’Beirn, who suggested this book on the theme of Longing and ‘the hunger to belong’ and who read and reread successive drafts, keeping a critical eye on structure and content and whose friendship and inspiration are generosity itself; the memory of my former teachers, Professor Gerard Watson, Professor Tom Marsh and Micéal O Regan, OP, for his wisdom of spirit; my family for their shelter and love; Connemara and Clare for their mystical spirit which awakens such longing and offers such a tenderness of belonging.
‘Stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore’
(So they all stood, each praying to be ferried across first
Their hands stretched out in longing for the further
shore)
Virgil, Aeneid VI, 313
‘Behold, I am the Ground of thy Beseeching.’
Julian of Norwich
‘A single beat from the heart of a lover is capable of
driving out a hundred sorrows.’
Naguib Mahfouz
I
Somewhere, out at the edges, the night
Is turning and the waves of darkness
Begin to brighten 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 colour
II
I arise to day
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,
Gentle in word,
Gracious in awareness
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love
I remember as a child discovering the echo of sound. It was the first time that my father took me up the mountain to herd the cattle. As we passed a limestone cliff, he called out to the cattle in the distance. His call had barely ended when it was copied exactly and sent forth again by the stone. It was a fascinating discovery. I tried out my own voice and the echo returned faithfully every time. It was as if the solid limestone mountains had secret hearing and voice. Their natural stillness and silence suddenly broke forth in an exact mimic of the human voice suggesting that there was a resonant heart in the depths of silence; the stone responds in a symmetry of sound. Hearing one’s echo in the lonely landscape of the mountains seems also to suggest that we are not alone, that we belong here on this earth. It is as if the symmetry of the echo comprised the radius of an invisible circle of belonging.
The hunger to belong is at the heart of our nature. Cut off from others, we atrophy and turn in on ourselves. Mostly, we do not need to make an issue of belonging; when we belong, we take it for granted. Merely to be excluded or to sense rejection hurts. When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness. We become vulnerable to fear and negativity. A sense of belonging, however, suggests warmth, understanding and embrace. The ancient and eternal values of human life – truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty and love – are all statements of true belonging.
Our hunger to belong is the longing to bridge the gulf that exists between isolation and intimacy. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Everyone longs for intimacy and dreams of a nest of belonging in which one is embraced, seen and loved. Something within each of us cries out for belonging. We can have all the world has to offer in terms of status, achievement and possessions, yet without a true sense of belonging, our lives feel empty and pointless. Like the tree that puts roots deep into the clay, each of us needs the anchor of belonging in order to bend with the storms and continue towards the light. Like the ocean that returns each time to the shore, a sense of belonging liberates us and empowers us to trust fully the rhythm of loss and longing. Like a welcoming circle of friendship, it also shelters us from the loneliness of life. Furthermore, when we belong, we have an outside mooring to prevent our minds from falling into the abyss within us. Though we may not reflect too frequently on the vast infinity that surrounds us, such infinity can be threatening; it makes us feel tiny, inconsequential and vulnerable.
Unknown to us, this sense of vulnerability intensifies our hunger to belong. Each one of us journeys alone into this world – and each one of us carries a unique world within our hearts. No-one experiences your life as you do; yours is a totally unique story of experiences and feelings. Yet no individual is sealed off or hermetically self-enclosed. Although each soul is individual and unique, by its very nature the soul hungers for relationship. Consequently, it is your soul that longs to belong – and it is your soul that makes all belonging possible. No soul is private. No soul is merely mortal. As well as being the vital principle of your individual life, your soul is also ancient and eternal; it weaves you into the great tapestry of spirit which connects everything everywhere. Belonging does not merely shelter you from the sense of being separate and different; its more profound intention is the awakening of the Great Belonging which embraces everything. At the root of our hunger to belong, therefore, is the desire to awaken this hidden affinity. It is only when we recognize this intimate unity that we know that we are not outsiders cut off from everything around us but rather participants at the very heart of creation. Each of us brings something alive in the world that is unique. There is a profound necessity at the heart of individuality. As we awaken to this sense of destiny, we can begin to live a life that is generous and worthy of the blessing that is always calling us.
In this post-modern world the hunger to belong has rarely been more intense, more urgent. With many of the ancient, traditional shelters now in ruins, it is as if society has lost the art of fostering community. Consumerism propels us towards an ever-more lonely and isolated existence. As consumerism numbs our longing, our sense of belonging becomes empty and cold. And although technology pretends to unite us, more often than not all it delivers are simulated images that distance us from our lives. The ‘global village’ has no roads or neighbours; it is a faceless, impersonal landscape from which all individuality has been erased. Our politicians seem devoid of imagination and inspiration, while many of the keepers of the great religious traditions now appear to be little more than frightened functionaries. In a more uniform culture, the management skills they employ would be efficient and successful. In a pluralistic and deeply fragmented culture, they are unable to speak to the complexities of our longings. From this perspective, it would seem that we are in the midst of a huge crisis of belonging. When the outer cultural shelters are in ruins, we need to explore and reawaken the depths of belonging in the human mind and soul that will lead us once again to unexpected possibilities of community and friendship.
In the Celtic tradition there was the beautiful notion of the anam ċara; anam is the Irish word for ‘soul’ and ċara is the word for ‘friend’. In the anam-ċara friendship, you are joined in an ancient way with the friend of your soul; you form a bond that neither space nor time can damage. The friendship awakens an eternal echo of love in the hearts of the friends as they enter into a circle of intimate belonging with each other.
Yet, although the anam-ċara friendship afforded a spiritual space to all the other longings of the human heart, it is true that there exists a restlessness in the human heart which may never be finally stilled by any one person or place. There is a constant and vital tension between longing and belonging. Without the shelter of belonging, our longings lack direction and focus. As memory gathers and anchors time, so does belonging shelter longing. Belonging without longing would be empty and dead, a cold frame around emptiness. The arduous task of being human is to balance longing and belonging to work with and against each other – so that all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of the heart may be awakened and realized. In Greek mythology, this theme finds poignant expression in the story of Echo, a nymph who could only use her voice in reptition of another. Echo was one of the many who fell in love with the beautiful Narcissus. One day she secretly follows Narcissus as he goes out hunting with friends, and although she longs to address him she is unable to do so because she cannot speak first. Her chance to speak comes when Narcissus loses his friends. Alone and isolated, he calls out to his companions and Echo seizes the opportunity to speak by repeating his calls back to him. But when Narcissus calls to his friends, ‘Let us come together here,’ Echo misunderstands him and, rushing to embrace him, reveals herself. Narcissus brutally rejects her and she is doomed to spend the rest of her life pining in demented longing for him.
Narcissus, of course, finally beheld his beauty in his reflection in a pool and fell in love with himself. But this love was a torture to him, for in falling in love with himself he is caught in an unbearable contradiction. In the figure of Narcissus, self and other collapse into one; he is both lover and beloved in one body. Unable to endure the torment of such desperate love that is its own object and can, therefore, never possess itself, he breaks the circle by killing himself. Echo is there at his death to repeat his desolate dying words.
In the subtle wisdom of Greek mythology it is no accident that Narcissus and Echo are paired. It is as if she externalizes the fatal symmetry of Narcissus’s self-obsession and his life path which is littered with those he has rejected. The irony here is that he, too, will have to reject himself with the same ferocity. Trapped within a sealed circle of self-belonging, his longing for himself leads to self-annihilation; he is unable to build any distance or otherness into his own self-love. It tells us much about the nature of Echo that her fate is twinned with his. She is totally vulnerable because she cannot speak first. Her name and nature are one. She longs for him and when he rejects her she is doomed and is reduced to little more than a lonely, desperate voice.
A book is barely an object, it is a tender presence fashioned from words, the secret echoes of the mind. This book attempts a poetic and speculative exploration of the creative tension between longing and belonging. The text has a dual structure: a first layer of image, story and reflection, and underlying this a more philosophical subtext which might invite a more personal journey of reflection. The modest hope is that in a broken world full of such eerie silence, this little reflection might clear a space in the heart so that the eternal echoes of your embrace in the shelter of the invisible circle of belonging may become audible. A true sense of belonging should allow us to become free and creative, and inhabit the silent depth within us. Such belonging would be flexible, open and challenging. Unlike the loneliness of Echo, it should liberate us from the traps of falsity and obsession, and enable us to enter the circle of friendship at the heart of creation. There is a resonant heart in the depth of silence. When your true heart speaks, the echo will return to assure you that every moment of your presence happens in the shelter of the invisible circle. These eternal echoes will transfigure your hunger to belong.
‘It seems John O’Donohue, in his two bestsellers – Anam Ċara and now Eternal Echoes – is forging a new consciousness for his race from ancient Celtic mysticism . . . This poet, philosopher and prophet has struck a chord deep in the Irish psyche’
Ireland on Sunday
‘A soaring, eloquent meditation on the art of living . . . Includes pertinent commentary not only on addiction, parenting and music but also on the lure of cults and the resurgence of political tribalism . . . O’Donohue has produced a treasury for readers of all faiths – a demanding, high-wire existentialist adventure that will inspire readers to re-evaluate their own goals and ways of being in the world . . . A profound, healing prayer’
Publishers Weekly
‘Grounded in a Celtic worldview, which is rich with the immediacy of the natural world and alive with the power of imagination, Eternal Echoes goes beyond simply invoking an ancient heritage, to address postmodern concerns . . . It is a book to savour: inspiring, substantive, deeply insightful, echoing the sense of presence and belonging, awakening and feeding what he refers to as our capacity to be the “echo-mirrors of contemplative nature”’
Caduceus
‘It might seem odd to say that this is not a book simply to be enjoyed . . . It is a book to be savoured. It is a book that asks to be read, and to be re-read, for the themes explored, and the way of exploration will not yield their messages quickly to any short prosaic summary. In brief, it is a meditation in the richest sense of the term’
Professor William Desmond, Leuven University The Furrow
‘John O’Donohue is a man of the soul. His scholarly meditation on the continuing relevance of Ireland’s spiritual heritage has become a publishing phenomenon . . . This poetic meditation has become a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. . . A lyrical epic prayer’
The Times
‘Anam Ċara is a radiant source of wisdom, a link between the human and the divine. This work is a blessed, rare gem’
Larry Dossey, bestselling author of Healing Words
‘Words of wisdom . . . A heady mixture of myth, poetry, philosophy . . . Profound and moving’
Independent
‘Anam Ċara is a rare synthesis of philosophy, poetry and spirituality. This work will have a powerful and life-transforming experience for those who read it’
Deepak Chopra, bestselling author of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
‘This book is a phenomenon in itself . . . A book to read and reread forever, its style of varied narration responds to our times’
Irish Times
www.booksattransworld.co.uk
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE DREAM. IN the external 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 to ever finally 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 become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of an unknown 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.
TO BE HUMAN IS TO BELONG. BELONGING IS a circle that embraces everything; if we reject it, we damage our nature. The word ‘belonging’ holds together the two fundamental aspects of life: being and longing, the Longing of our being and the Being of our longing. Belonging is deep; only in a superficial sense does it refer to our external attachment to people, places and things. It is the living and passionate presence of the soul. Belonging is the heart and warmth of intimacy. When we deny it, we grow cold and empty. Our life’s journey is the task of refining our belonging so that it may become more true, loving, good and free. We do not have to force belonging. The longing within us always draws us towards belonging, and again towards new forms of belonging, when we have outgrown the old ones. Post-modern culture tends to define identity in terms of ownership: possessions, status and qualities. The crucial essence of ‘who’ you are is not owned by you. The most intimate Belonging is Self-Belonging. Yet your self is not something you could ever own; it is rather the total gift which every moment of your life endeavours to receive with honour. True belonging is gracious receptivity. This is the appropriate art of belonging in friendship – where friends do not belong to each other, but rather with each other. This with reaches to the depths of their twinned souls.
True belonging is not, therefore, ownership; it never grasps or holds on out of fear or greed. Belonging knows its own shape and direction. True belonging comes from within. It strives for a harmony between the outer forms of belonging and the inner music of the soul. We seem to have forgotten the true depth and spiritual nature of intimate Belonging. Our minds are over-saturated and demented. We need to rediscover ascetical tranquillity and come home to the temple of our senses. This would anchor our longing and helps us to feel the world from within. When we allow dislocation to control us, we become outsiders, exiled from the intimacy of true unity with ourselves, each other and creation. Our bodies know that they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless. Guided by longing, belonging is the wisdom of rhythm. When we are in rhythm with our own nature, things flow and balance naturally. Every fragment does not have to be relocated, re-ordered; things cohere and fit according to their deeper impulse and instinct. Our modern hunger to belong is particularly intense. An increasing majority of people feel no belonging. We have fallen out of rhythm with life. The art of belonging is the recovery of the wisdom of rhythm.
Like fields, mountains and animals we know we belong here on earth. However, unlike them, the quality and passion of our longing make us restlessly aware that we cannot belong to the earth. The longing in the human soul makes it impossible for us ever to fully belong to any place, system or project. We are involved passionately in the world, yet there is nothing here that can claim us completely. When we forget how partial and temporary our belonging must remain, we put ourselves in the way of danger and disappointment. We compromise something eternal within us. The sacred duty of being an individual is to gradually learn how to live so as to awaken the eternal within you. Our ways of belonging in the world should never be restricted to or fixated on one kind of belonging that remains stagnant. If you listen to the voices of your own longing, they will constantly call you to diverse styles of belonging which are new and energetic and mirror the complexity of your life as you deepen and intensify your presence on earth.
WHY DO WE NEED TO BELONG? WHY IS THIS desire so deeply rooted in every heart? The longing to belong seems to be ancient and is at the core of our nature. Though you may often feel isolated, it is the nature of your soul to belong. The soul can never be separate; its eternal dream is intimacy and belonging. When we are rejected or excluded, we become deeply wounded. To be forced out, to be pushed to the margin hurts us. The most terrifying image in Christian theology is a state of absolute exclusion from belonging. The most beautiful image in all religion is heaven or nirvana: the place of total belonging, where there is no separation or exclusion any more. A Buddhist friend once gave a definition of nirvana: the place where the winds of destiny no longer blow. This suggests that it is a place of undisturbed belonging. We long to belong because we feel the lonesomeness of being individuals. Deep within us we long to come in out of separation and be at home again in the embrace of a larger belonging. The wonder of being a human is the freedom offered to you through your separation and distance from every other person and thing. You should live your freedom to the full because it is such a unique and temporary gift. The rest of nature would love to have the liberation we enjoy. When you suppress your wild longing and opt for the predictable and safe forms of belonging, you sin against the rest of nature that longs to live deeply through you. When your way of belonging in the world is truthful to your nature and your dreams, your heart finds contentment and your soul finds stillness. You are able to participate fully in the joy and adventure of exploration and your life opens up for living, joyfully, powerfully and tenderly. Conversely, when you are excluded or rejected, your life inevitably tends to narrow into a concern, and sometimes an obsession, with that exclusion and the attempt to change it.
The shelter of belonging empowers you; it confirms in you a stillness and sureness of heart. You are able to endure external pressure and confusion; you are sure of the ground on which you stand. Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible and eternal heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root out of which all longing grows. Something in you knows and, perhaps, remembers that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth. It is the best antidote to the fear of freedom which is second nature to many people. Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential and it will not rest until it is awakened. Your longing is the Divine Longing in human form.
WHERE DO WE GET OUR IDEA OF BELONGING from? What is true belonging? It seems that the whole origin of belonging is rooted in the faithfulness of place. Each one of us awakens on the earth in a particular place. This place was, and remains, full of presence and meaning for us. As a child one of the first things you learn is your name and where you live. If you were to get lost, you would know where you belong. When you know where you belong, then you know where you are. Where you belong is where you inevitably continue to return. In some strange way you long for the stability and sureness of belonging which nature enjoys. As you grow you develop the ideal of where your true belonging could be – the place, the home, the partner and the work. You seldom achieve all the elements of the ideal, but it travels with you as the criterion and standard of what true belonging could be. You travel certainly, in every sense of the word. But you take with you everything that you have been, just as the landscape stores up its own past. Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere. No-one can survive by remaining totally restless. You need to settle and belong in order to achieve any peace of heart and creativity of imagination.
We live in times of constant activity and excitement. Media present endless images of togetherness, talk-shows and parties. Yet behind all the glossy imagery and activity there is a haunted lonesomeness at the vacant heart of contemporary life. There is a desperate hunger for belonging. People feel isolated and cut off. Perhaps this is why a whole nation can assemble around the images of celebrities. They have no acquaintance with these celebrities personally. They look at them from a distance and project all their longings on to them. When something happens to a celebrity, they feel as if it is happening to themselves. There is an acute need for the reawakening of the sense of community. It is true that neighbours are not necessarily close to you. They do not need to be friends. But there is a strong sense that humans who live in clusters with each other are meant to look out for, and look after, each other, rather than living in such isolation while near each other. This is a primal sense of duty. You often notice, when something happens to someone on the street or in the village, neighbours who had never been in the house before come to help and support. In Ireland this is especially apparent at a time of bereavement. People simply gather around so that you are not left alone with the shock and silence of death. While drawing little attention to itself, this support brings so much healing and shelter. It is something you would never forget; and the beauty is how naturally it happens. During times of suffering the shelter of belonging calms us. The particular shape of belonging must always strive to meet our longing.
EVERY HUMAN HEART IS FULL OF LONGING. You long to be happy, to live a meaningful and honest life, to find love and to be able to open your heart to someone; you long to discover who you are and to learn how to heal your own suffering and become free and compassionate. To be alive is to be suffused with longing. The voices of longing keep your life alert and urgent. Yet if you cannot discover the shelter of belonging within your life, you could become a victim and target of your longing, pulled hither and thither without any anchorage anywhere. It is consoling that each of us lives and moves within the great embrace of the earth. You can never fall out of the shelter of this belonging. Part of the reason that we are so demented in our modern world is that we have lost the sense of belonging on the earth.
If you were a stone, you could remain still, gathered in silent witness in the same landscape. The horizons and the infinity would never trouble you. Nothing could draw you out. As a human, your daily experience is riven with fracture and fragmentation. Like a nomad you wander from event to event, from person to person, unable to settle anywhere for too long. The day is a chase after ghost duties; at evening you are exhausted. A day is over and so much of it was wasted on things that meant so little to you, duties and meetings from which your heart was absent. Months and years pass and you fumble on, still incapable of finding a foothold on the path of time you walk. A large proportion of your activity distracts you from remembering that you are a guest of the universe, to whom one life has been given. You mistake the insistent pressure of daily demands for reality and your more delicate and intuitive nature wilts. When you wake from your obsessions, you feel cheated. Your longing is being numbed and your belonging becoming merely external. Your way of life has so little to do with what you feel and love in the world. But, because of the many demands on you and responsibilities that you have, you feel helpless to gather your self; you are dragged in so many directions away from true belonging.
I was at a wedding once where an incident occurred, in fact, it was more of an event. The wedding breakfast was over and the music had begun. There was an older woman there. She was a quiet person who kept to herself, a shy country woman who was there because she was a next-door neighbour of the bride. Everyone knew that her husband was an upright person, but mean and controlling. They suspected that she had a very hard life with him. There always seemed to be a sadness around her; though he was quite wealthy, she never seemed to have anything new to wear. She had married young in a culture, and at a time, that if you made a huge mistake in your choice of partner there was no way out. You continued to lie on your bed of thorns and put a brave face on things for the neighbours. At the wedding she began to have a few drinks. She had never drunk alcohol before and it was not long until the veneer of control and reservation began to fall away. The music was playing but there was no-one dancing. She got up on her own and danced. It was a wild dance. It seemed that the music had got inside her and set her soul at large. She was oblivious of everyone. She took the full space of the floor and used it. She danced in movements that mixed ballet and rock. Everyone stood back, watching her, in silence. Her poor dance was lonesome, the fractured movements, the coils of gesture unravelling in the air. Yet there was something magical happening in it too. Often there is a greater kindness in gesture. Here she was, dancing out thirty years of captive longing. The façade of social belonging was down. The things she could never say to anyone came flooding out in her dance. In rhythm with the music, the onlookers began to shout encouragement. She did not even seem to hear them; she was dancing. When the music stopped, she returned to her table, blushing, but holding her head high. Her eyes were glad, and there was a smile beginning around the corners of her mouth.
THE HUMAN HEART IS INHABITED BY MANY different longings. In its own voice each one calls to your life. Some longings are easily recognized and the direction in which they call you is clear. Other voices are more difficult to decipher. At different times of your life, they whisper to you in unexpected ways. It can take years before you are able to hear where exactly they want to call you. Beneath all these is a longing that has somehow always been there and will continue to accompany every future moment of your life. It is a longing that you will never be able to clearly decipher though it will never cease to call you. At times it will bring you to tears; at other times it will set your heart wild. No person you meet will ever quell it. You can be at one with the love of your life, give all of your heart and it will still continue to call you. In quiet moments in your love, even at moments of intimacy that feel like an absolute homecoming, a whisper of this longing will often startle you. It may prod you into unease and make you question your self and your ability to love and to open yourself to love. Even when you achieve something that you have worked for over years, the voice of this longing will often surface and qualify your achievement. When you listen to its whisper, you will realize that it is more than a sense of anticlimax. Even when everything comes together and you have what you want, it will not stifle this unwelcome voice.
What voice is this? Why does it seep with such unease into our happiness? Deep down in each of us is a huge desire to belong. Without a sense of belonging, we are either paralysed or utterly restless. Naturally, when you enter times of belonging, you would love to anchor and rest there. At such times your heart settles. You feel you have arrived, you relax and let your self belong with all your heart. Then, the voice whispers and your belonging is qualified. The voice always makes you feel that something is missing. Even when everything you want is on your table and everyone you love is there in your life, you still feel something is missing. You are not able to name what is missing. If you could, you might be able to go somewhere to get it. But you cannot even begin. Something that feels vital to you lies out of your reach in the unknown. The longing to fill this absence drives some people out of the truth and shelter of love; they begin a haunted journey on a never-ending path in quest of the something that is missing. Others seek it in the accumulation of possessions. Again, this small voice leads other people into the quest for the Divine.
The voice comes from your soul. It is the voice of the eternal longing within you and it confirms you as a relentless pilgrim on the earth. There is something within you that no-one or nothing else in the world is able to meet or satisfy. When you recognize that such unease is natural, it will free you from getting on the treadmill of chasing ever more temporary and partial satisfactions. This eternal longing will always insist on some door remaining open somewhere in all the shelters where you belong. When you befriend this longing, it will keep you awake and alert to why it is that you are here on earth. It will intensify your journey but also liberate you from the need to go on many seductive but futile quests. Longing can never be fulfilled here on earth. As the Un-Still Stones sang so memorably some decades ago: ‘I can’t get no satisfaction.’ The beauty of being human is the capacity and desire for intimacy. Yet we know that even those who are most intimate remain strange to us. Like children, we often ‘make strange’ with each other. This keeps our longing alert.
ONE OF THE DEEPEST LONGINGS IN THE human heart is the desire to be loved for yourself alone. This longing awakens you completely. When you are touched by love, it reaches down into your deepest fibre. It is difficult to realize actually how desperately we need love. You inhabit your life, you seem to be in control. You live within an independent physical body. From the outside, you seem to be managing very well. Because you present this face to the world, no-one suspects that you have a different ‘inner body’ called the heart which can do nothing for itself if it is not loved. If our hearts were our outside bodies, we would see crippled bodies transform into ballet dancers under the gaze, and in the embrace, of love. It is difficult to love yourself, if you are not first loved. When you are loved, your heart rushes forth in the joy of the dance of life. Like someone who has been lost for years in a forgotten place, you rejoice in being found. When you are discovered, you then discover yourself. This infuses your whole life with new vigour and light. People notice a difference in you. It is nice to be around you. Love somehow transfigures the sad gravity of life. The gloom lifts and your soul is young and free. Love awakens the youthfulness of the heart. You discover your creative force. It is quite touching to see love bring someone home so swiftly to themselves. The Connemara poet Caitlin Maude writes:
His little beak
Under his wing
The thrush of our love.
(Translated by the author)
Even without the outside lover, you can become the beloved. When you awaken in appreciation and love for your self, springtime awakens in your heart. Your soul longs to draw you into love for your self. When you enter your soul’s affection the torment ceases in your life. St Bonaventure says in The Journey of the Mind to God: ‘Enter into yourself, therefore, and observe that your soul loves itself most fervently.’
THE ONE WHO DREAMED THE UNIVERSE loved circles. There is some strange way in which everything that goes forward is somehow still travelling within the embrace of the circle. Longing and belonging are fused within the circle. The day, the year, the ocean’s way, the light, the water and the life insist on moving in the rhythm of the circle. The mind is a circle too. This is what keeps you gathered in your self. If you were just a point in space, you would be forever isolated and alone. If your life were simply a line through time, you would be always trapped at this point with all past and future points absent. The beauty of the mind is its circular form. Yet the circle of the mind is broken somewhere. This fracture is always open; it is the secret well from which all longing flows. All prayer, love, creativity and joy come from this source; our fear and hurt often convert them into their more sinister shadows.
This breakage within us is what makes us human and vulnerable. There is nothing more sinister than someone whose mind seems to be an absolute circle; there is a helpless coldness and a deadly certainty about such a presence. When you discover this inner well of longing, it can frighten you and send you into flight from yourself. If you can be tranquil, amazing things can flow from it. Your body is open physically to the world and the well of your mind flows out of ancient ground. This is reminiscent of the mountains here in the Burren where there are many wells. The face of the well is on the surface; it is such a pure and surprising presence. Yet the biography of the well is hidden under eternities of mountain and clay. Similarly, within you, the well is an infinite source. The waters are coming from far away. Yet as long as you are on this earth, this well will never run dry. The flow of thought, feeling, image and word will always continue. The well of soul flows from the fracture in the circle of the mind. This is, in a sense, a frightening inner opening – anything can flow through from the distant and unknown mountains. Part of the wonder of living a real life is to make peace with this infinite inner opening. Nothing can ever close it. When you listen to the voices of your longing, you will begin to understand the adventure and the promise of life with which you are privileged.
CELTIC SPIRITUALITY REMINDS US THAT WE DO not live simply in our thoughts, feelings or relationships. We belong on the earth. The rhythm of the clay and its seasons sings within our hearts. The sun warms the clay and fosters life. The moon blesses the night. In the uncluttered world of Celtic spirituality there is a clear view of the sacrament of nature as it brings forth visible presence. The Celts worshipped in groves in nature and attended to the silent divinity of wild places. Certain wells, trees, animals and birds were sacred to them. Where and what a people worship always offers a clue to where they understand the source of life to be. Most of our experience of religion happens within the walled frame of church or temple. Our God is approached through thought, word and ritual. The Celts had no walls around their worship. Being in nature was already to be in the Divine Presence. Nature was the theatre of the diverse dramaturgies of the Divine Imagination. This freedom is beautifully echoed in a later lyric poem:
Ah, blackbird it is well for you,
Wherever in the thicket be your nest,
Hermit that sounds no bell,
Sweet, soft, fairylike is your note.
(Translated by Myles Dillon)
The contemplative presence of nature is not ostentatious or cluttered by thought. Its majesty and elegance drift into voice in the single, subtle note of the blackbird.
TO AWAKEN A SENSE OF OUR ANCIENT longing for nature can help us to anchor our longing. When we go out alone and enter its solitude, we return home to our souls. When you find a place in nature where your mind and heart find rest, then you have discovered a sanctuary for your soul. The West of Ireland landscape offers welcoming shelter to the soul. You can go to places in the limestone mountains where you are above the modern world; you will see nothing from the twenty centuries. There is only the subtle sculpture that rain and wind has indented on the stone. When the light comes out the stone turns white and you remember that this is living stone from the floor of an ancient ocean. Your eye notices how the fossils are locked into its solidification. Some of the stone, particularly at the edges, is serrated and shattered. In other places the long limestone pavement is as pure and clear as if it had just been minted. Swept clean by the wind, these pavements are smooth and certain. The eye is surprised at the still clusters of white, red and yellow flowers amidst the applause of rock. Moments of absolute blue startle the eye from the nests of gentian. Purple orchids sway elegantly in the breeze. Over the edge of the mountain you can hear the chorus of the ocean. Its faithful music has never abandoned this stone world that once lived beneath its waters. Perhaps nature senses the longing that is in us, the restlessness that never lets us settle. She takes us into the tranquillity of her stillness if we visit her. We slip into her quiet contemplation and inhabit for a while the depth of her ancient belonging. Somehow we seem to become one with the rhythm of the universe. Our longing is purified and we gain strength to come back to life refreshed, and refine our ways of belonging in the world. Nature calls us to tranquillity and rhythm. When your heart is confused or heavy, a day outside in nature’s quiet eternity restores your lost tranquillity.
THERE IS AN ANCIENT FAITHFULNESS IN nature. Mountains, fields and shorelines are still to be found in the same places after thousands of years. Landscape is alive in such a dignified and reserved way. It can keep its memories and dreams to itself. Landscape lives the contemplative life of silence, solitude and stillness. It carries and holds its depths of darkness and lonesomeness with such perfect equanimity. It never falls out of its native rhythm. Rains come with intensity and surprise. Winds rise and keen like lost children, then grow still. Seasons build and emerge with such sure completion, then give way. Yet nature never loses its sense of sequence. Tides clear the shore and seem to push the sea out, then turn and with great excitement adorn the shore with blue again. Dawn and dusk frame our time here in sure circles. Landscape is at once self-sufficient and hospitable; we are not always worthy guests.
Though its belonging is still and sure, there is also a sense in which nature is trapped in the one place. This must intensify the longing at the heart of nature. A little bird alights and fidgets for a minute on a massive rock that was left behind in the corner of this field by the ice thousands of years ago. The miracle of flight is utter freedom for the bird; it can follow its longing anywhere. The stillness of the stone is pure but it also means that it can never move one inch from its thousand-year stand. It enjoys absolute belonging but if it longs to move it can only dream of the return of the ice. Perhaps the stone’s sense of time has the patience of eternity. There is a pathos of stillness in nature and yet all of us, its children, are relentlessly moved by longing; we can never enter the innocence of its belonging. Where can we behold nature’s longing? All we see of nature is surface. Yet the beauty she sends to the surface could only come from the creativity of great and noble longing. The arrival of spring is a miracle of the richest colour. Yet we always seem to forget that all of these beautiful colours have been born in darkness. The dark earth is the well out of which colour flows. Think of the patience of trees. Year after year stretching up to the light, keeping a lifeline open between the dark night of the clay and the blue shimmer of the heavens. Think of the beautiful, high contours of mountains lifting up the earth, the music of streams and the fluent travel of rivers linking the stolid silence of landmasses with the choruses of the ocean. Think of animals who carry in their dignity and simplicity of presence such refined longing. Think of your self and feel how you belong so deeply on the earth and how you are a tower of longing in which nature rises up and comes to voice. We are the children of the clay who have been released so that the earth may dance in the light.
The Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty was born in Gort na gCapall in Inis Mór in Aran. He left there as a young man and had never returned. Shortly before he died, he returned to that little village. A lifetime of changes had occurred, most of those he once knew were now dead. On his way into the village he saw the big rock which had been there for thousands of years. O’Flaherty hit the old stone with his walking stick and said: ‘A Chloich mhóir athním tusa