Air Water Fire Stone
In The Four Elements, poet and philosopher John O’Donohue draws upon his Celtic heritage and the love of his native landscape, the west of Ireland, to weave a tapestry of beautifully evoked images of nature.
As John explores a range of themes relating to the way we live our lives today, he reveals how the energy and rhythm of the natural world – its innocence and creativity, its power and splendour – hold profound lessons for us all.
With a foreword written by his beloved brother Pat, this illuminating and thought-provoking treasury is a unique collection of reflections inspired by the ancient wisdom of this earth.
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Foreword
The Breath of God
Breath and Time
Breath as Prayer
Air and the Invisible
Space as Welcome and Possibility
The Tears of the Earth
To Free the Silted Source
The Language of Tears
The Well: Free Flow Between the Known and the Unknown
Water and Time
The Ocean as Immense Divinity
The River: Fluent Presence Through Landscape
Rains from the Heavens
Water as Mirror
The Folklore of Water
At Home at the Hearth of Spirit
Origins in Fire
Fire in the Earth
Fire on the Earth
Fire and Fear
Fire and the Soul
As the Tabernacle of Memory
Landscape: First Born of Creation
Landscape and Silence
Landscape as Presence
Transience and Memory
The Memory of the Earth
Stone as the Tabernacle of Memory
Stone: A Fourfold Conversation with the Elements
Stone and Fire
Stone and Earth
Stone and Air
Stone and Water
About the Author
Also by John O’Donohue
Copyright
AS WE JOURNEY from the womb of the sea with our gaze of longing fixed on the stars, we have stopped off on this earth for a short spell of belonging. The unity of the four elements is what constitutes and sustains our existence in this world.
This beautiful publication of John’s first four booklets on the elements – Air, Fire, Stone and Water – is a revisiting of the sowing fields where he first spread his thought. These seeds of thought sprouted in two simultaneous directions, as in the growth of a tree. Downward and deeper into the earth source where the depth and spread of the roots determined the height and extension of the branches. On these branches blossomed the fruit of Anam Ċara, Eternal Echoes, Divine Beauty, Echoes of Memory, Conamara Blues and his final creation, Benedictus. It was as if these inspiring books, having been born of the elements, finally formalized their blessing in the voice of Benedictus.
I sit and write here in this valley of John’s birth gazing at the landscape with eyes that battle against familiarity. I wonder in amazement at the great ability he had to walk these mountains with a new, fresh sense of adventure on each pilgrimage.
I think that it’s a beautiful challenge to try to look at our own lives and the lives of our loved ones with new eyes. The treasure here is that we can become a lot more excited by possibility and a lot less bored at the knowing that has numbed us.
Here in this valley, the mountains rise up to the horizon in gentle slopes all around. Flat terrain always seems clouded by distance and is always running away from the eye. The landscape of this valley raises itself up in a call for attention. The mountains seem to tempt us to climb them. On reaching the horizon that calls us, the mountain presents another one and then another, as if enticing us higher into their dream each time. As Hans Georg Gadamer writes in Truth and Method:
A horizon is something towards which we move, but it’s also something that moves along with us.
It is only on the north-west side of the valley that the horizon suddenly drops down to earth in order to guide the river on its final journey into the sea. The river snakes down through the landscape in a gentle flow as if it needs time to harvest all the sounds and moments of the valley. Then it returns them to the eternity of the sea. John often used this as a metaphor for the flow of life, beautifully depicted in his poem ‘Fluent’:
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
This valley in which John was born and raised was the shell of his soul. He always referred to it as, ‘. . . a private valley with its own private sky’.
We were born into a farming family and our first lessons were learnt through the medium of nature. The tender guides to our early learning were parents and an uncle who walked so lightly and with a comfortable and natural step along the landscape of their daily lives. It was a simple yet treasured childhood that we were waking up to, the ideal nest for John’s amazing intellect. The interplay between farmer and the elements was a poem without words, the echo of which would always return to him.
The air could hold the ‘breeze of the rain’ or the ‘wind of warmth’ to the discerning nose.
The stone carved its memory deep into the hands that chiselled it.
Fire was the life in the hearth which was the centre of the home.
Water introduced itself to us from its most natural source in streams and wells.
As children we would be sent to the well for ‘a bucket of spring’, and always the stream gurgled on, carrying its blessing further on to where it was needed.
As a child’s mind begins to awaken to this world, the doorway to the eternal closes behind and time seems to introduce itself more slowly and gently at first. Our days of childhood here in this valley seemed long. There weren’t any of the modern technological distractions to kidnap us from our days. Nights would bring neighbours to our hearth where talk would fill the air as stories told their news and allowed memories to dance.
Then, if we were left up late enough, we could witness the planning of the next day’s work. This was done in such a way that brought continuity between the day that had passed and the day that was to come. In front of the fire was where the link was forged and opened to introduce the facts of a lived day to the possibilities of the approaching dawn. It was as if the living of each day dreamt its plan through the night. There was an innocence and naturalness about it.
To a young mind, work seemed to be the price that was gladly paid for the privilege of living so closely with the earth. Work was a real conversation with the landscape. It was not an abuse or raiding of the landscape. It was amazing to learn how to work in this context. Instead of being told ‘it has to be done’, you would hear how the work ‘needs to be done’ or ‘wants to be done’. Of course there were times when the work lapsed into drudgery but we were taught to find our own rhythm within work. This helped us to keep going when it got boringly repetitive or when the connection became severed.
Every spring the turf (peat) would be cut and saved and brought home to keep the fire element sustained in the hearth during winter. On our first day in the bog we would be told to take it easy and not overdo it. The practicality of this was to ensure that energy desire and determination would last for the following two or three weeks and not spend itself all on the first day. It also presented us with the space and time to re-awaken our own rhythm within this particular kind of work.
John valued these lessons. In Anam Ċara he says:
I was always grateful that I was taught how to work. Ever since, I have found satisfaction in being able to do a day’s work. I find it frustrating when a day goes astray, and all the possibilities that slept in that day remain unmet.
Landscape was so alive for John and the wilder and more untamed it was, the more he rejoiced in it. He used to say that, ‘As humans emerge from landscape, we have a constant need for the physical, sensuous, elemental interaction with the actual landscape.’
As humans we are always trying to tame landscape and while we are in it we are always going somewhere else. Only the animals seem to be totally at home in landscape. They carry enormous witness to the stillness and silence of landscape.
Our world is becoming more busy and noisy. We are pushing silence out of our lives at a rate that suggests a fear of what it has to say to us about ourselves. Silence is the voice of the mystery. Silence lets us dream again.
The philosopher Pascal said that most of our problems arise from our inability to sit still in a room. Animals can lie so still in landscape, gazing at what we call ‘nothing’, but who knows what they are entertaining or what is entertaining them!
As humans we have hijacked all the mystical qualities for the mind and reserved the presence of soul for humans.
In these essays John is giving back to landscape its own natural subjectivity. It is something to be respected in its own terms, something to be listened to and looked at with its own spirit. Interaction with landscape can heal you if you respect it. It can also return its pain to you if you abuse or damage it. On a deeper level, landscape can bring you deeper into the mystery of ‘why you are here’ if you can enter the realm of imagination. The knowing which is in imagination is knowing through exploration, not predetermined concepts or ideas. John describes this in the section on ‘Water’:
The imagination is always drawn to the hidden form of things. Through its patience it coaxes the form to emerge . . . It works to discover the forms of perception and possibility that we need for our journey. In this way it elicits the form of one’s identity as it emerges from the matrix of one’s experience.
John returned home from Germany in 1990 and took up parish duties as a priest in his Galway diocese. He had spent four years immersed in the intellectual field of German philosophical thought. His main aim during this time was to chase down Hegel so that he could have a really good conversation with him as he entered deeper into the field of Hegelian thought. His achievements there were remarkable. He received the highest accolade of any foreign student at the university of Tübingen. He used to give a beautiful, humorous account of an episode which took place in our kitchen at home when he had returned from Germany. On that day, some neighbours called in ar cuairt (to visit). As he described it, ‘. . . during the course of the entire conversation, not one analytical thing was said, yet an amazing amount of news and inform ation was shared and conclusions reached, all through the medium of story and anecdote.’
John loved his time in Germany and the depth and authenticity of its intellectual history and tradition. However, I always felt that the lyrical and poetic fluency of the language of his home was his favourite means of expression.
Having completed a masterful account of his conversation with Hegelian thought in the book, Person als Vermittlung (The Person as Mediator) he then focused his mind and heart on having a conversation with the elements, with landscape and the way in which humans inhabit this earth.
This earth is the only constant in our lives. It has been here for millions of years before us. It was his gift to unearth its riches: that this ‘human-come-lately’ is but the latest link in the chain of evolution.
We must become aware of our present stage of ‘becoming’ and to do this we need to look back at our history. In school we learned that we must understand our history, otherwise we condemn ourselves to making the mistakes of the past. All the animals and creatures of this earth are our former brothers and sisters but because we believe that we have ‘dominion’ over them, we have become cruel little emperors. Maybe it is time now to look again at all our achieved conclusions and realize that landscape isn’t just inert matter.
This was the beauty in John’s originality; he wrestled the terms of reference that were used to think about ‘soul’ from religious institutions. He carried them outdoors to the landscape and let them free among the elements. Here they danced their dream of possibility as air breathed freshness, stone offered memory, water cleansed and fire burned dross.
John’s first offering, STONE as the tabernacle of memory, was first published in 1994. Then in 1995 the other three meditations were published: FIRE at home at the hearth of spirit, AIR the breath of God, and WATER the tears of the earth.
These publications signified the laying of the foundation for the cathedral of thought that he was to become. A beginning, as he used to say himself, is very innocent. It is a setting of something in motion, the destination of which remains a secret to all except itself. In order to enter fully into the thought-field that John created it is necessary to use these four meditations as the entrance.
I remember my own ‘begin-again’ as I returned to this valley and built my own house. The central part of the house for me was the hearth so I built it using limestone from the valley. It was a fine summer that year so the limestone was perfectly dry and all the cutting and chiselling left a film of fine white powder on its skin. On completion it was left to settle for six or seven weeks while the rest of the house was finished. Then, prior to moving in I lit the first fire in the hearth.
When I came back into the house some hours later, the air in the house was filled with a strange scent. It was that distinctive smell of the sea. My bone dry limestone was glistening wet. Some of the stones that had been chiselled even showed that deep blue of an evening ocean.
It seemed as if the stone was flushing out its ancient memory from deep within its pores. It was releasing it into the air where it could be absorbed by all the other elements of this home. In this way the stone seemed to be acknowledging its new place in the hearth and creating space in its caverns for all the memories and sounds of this new life. Here in this hearth it witnesses and records the forging of links between journeys that are planned in front of its fire.
I think that the timing of the publication of this book on the elements is providential. We are witnessing the collapse of systems that have been used to control society. Our appointed surgeon leaders only have Band-Aids in their first-aid kits as they rush their bleeding victim into theatre for major surgery. Maybe now is the time to look back again at the other possibilities that surround the basic elements that created the society that we now have. I think that the society that we have been complicit in creating has totally spent itself in the alienation of the human being from nature. We have accepted given conclusions without question. We have adopted second-hand ways of thinking that do not suit us at all. This has hindered us in finding our own way of being in the world.
In these meditations John inspires us to look again at the thought patterns and habits that we have created. He speaks about the elements in a poetic, imaginative way. He extends to them the presence of an open mind which calls forth a conversation overflowing with beauty and mystery.
Here in this valley, I look on this landscape as my friend. She allows me to live here through all of her seasons and moods. She shows me shelter and beauty. All she asks of me is respect and love. When two really close friends meet, sometimes there is no need to fill the space with words and talk. Stillness and silence enhance presence, of each to the other, captured beautifully by Fernando Pessoa:
Let me hear
the silence
that there is
after your singing.
One of John’s favourite quotes was from Meister Eckhart:
Nothing in the universe resembles God more than silence.
John had mastered this art of being mindful and still. When he sat with you, you knew that his attention was sincere and his presence was real. He could gently steer a cluttered or frozen way of thinking away from its addiction to the obstacle and set it free onto a new path. In this way the obstacle would diminish and the fresh approach lifted the fog that paralysed your thinking.
Here in the Burren you are befriended by rocks and stones wherever you go. They only become obstacles if you can’t find your way around them. When we were being introduced to the world of garden and meadow it was natural to see a massive grey conversation piece protruding through the brown soil or the green grass. The rows of vegetables never seemed perturbed as they continued around the possible obstacle like the flow of the river meandering on its way further down the valley. In fact, the fruits of the garden often flourished in the vicinity of this rock. The heat of the limestone warmed the seed and its size sheltered the tender young blossom. It also presented the tired back with a justifiable occasion of straightening and rest. In a mysterious kind of way it seemed beneficial, if not necessary, to have a ‘could be’ obstacle on your path.
All human beings are involved at different levels of a thought process. John always found thought to be the most amazing medium of all. He absolutely loved Meister Eckhart’s saying, that ‘thoughts are our inner senses’. We experience the physical world through our outer senses and our thought process stimulates an excited dance of assimilation. If one of our outer senses becomes impaired then there is a corresponding gap in the stream of experience. Similarly, if our thought process becomes impaired through lack of practice or development, the harvest gathered by the outer senses is confined to storage, never to satiate the inner hunger.
If you never investigate the dream of your own thoughts, then at best you will only meander through your life, picking different points on the surface of thought. You will never be able to bore down to open your own source.
John always used to say that we need to realize that the shape, quality and intensity of thought, or lack of it, in our lives is directly related to our thought patterns and thought habits. In other words the givenness of the world is false in a sense because it is just not ‘there’ but is mediated and met through the lens of one’s thinking.
His legacy to us in written and spoken word is made all the more precious by the fact that his daily life was lived out and was nourished by the harvest of thought that he developed. He relentlessly and respectfully pursued Hegel and Eckhart especially, until they finally capitulated and had a conversation with him. He used to say that, ‘great thinkers put their eye to the earth at a strange angle.’ He persevered until he discerned this angle and then put his own eye to it. John guarded against superficial scholarship by cultivating and constantly exploring a confidence in his own way of thinking. He fine-tuned his own mind and was always watching out for and being attentive to the sources that were being called to awaken within him during this process.
Our island of Ireland has a long history of emigration. Those who left would always send some of their newly found wealth back home to the ones left behind. This caring element of wanting to share and to improve the lives of others was paramount to John’s way of thinking and living.
The attainment of knowledge could never be an end in itself. It should never be hijacked by elitism or paraded by the powerful. It is only a doorway. Its main ambition is to seduce towards new horizons of possibility in thought and then in praxis. In this way we can increase the quality of our own existence and enrich the lives of others. As the saying goes: ‘To change your life, all you have to do is change your way of thinking.’ New thoughts have the freshness of water as it heals the cracked skin of parched earth, calling forth new growth as it journeys back to its source.
John saw one of the aspects of his priestly ministry as that of educating people’s fingers so that they could ‘un-net their own entanglements’. The beauty in this approach is that as the layers of given answers are peeled back, the heart becomes filled with wild desire for the question. To put it mildly, this was something of a new approach, especially in an institution that had prided itself on having all the answers!
He would have made such a wonderful professor in the corridors of academia, coaching and teasing privileged minds towards new horizons of thought. However, as he used to say himself, he had ‘done enough time’ in institutions. John always wanted to bring his awakened mind back home to the landscape that formed him, that needed the minding of his voice as much as his heart needed the sureness of her rhythm. Here among the elements, there could be no more suitable canvas for the dream of his thought. He needed the freedom of flight so that he could soar towards the visions that beckoned.
I often think that his soul always knew that his time on this earth would be short. He often said that his greatest fear was his awareness of ‘days running through his fingers like grains of very fine sand and being unable to stop it’. It was as if John’s final book Benedictus was calling to write itself around the blessing of these, his original meditations on the four elements.