Anam Cara
John O’Donohue
Anam Cara
A Book of Celtic Wisdom
BEANNACHT
For Josie
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the gray window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colors,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the curach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
In memory of my father, Paddy O’Donohue,
who worked stone so poetically,
and my uncle Pete O’Donohue,
who loved the mountains
And my aunt Brigid
In memory of John, Willie, Mary,
and Ellie O’Donohue,
who emigrated and now rest in American soil
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1 The Mystery of Friendship
Light Is Generous
The Celtic Circle of Belonging
The Human Heart Is Never Completely Born
Love Is the Nature of the Soul
The Umbra Nihili
The Anam Cara
Intimacy as Sacred
The Mystery of Approach
Diarmuid and Gráinne
Love as Ancient Recognition
The Circle of Belonging
The Kalyana-mitra
The Soul as Divine Echo
The Wellspring of Love Within
The Transfiguration of the Senses
The Wounded Gift
In the Kingdom of Love, There Is No Competition
2 Toward a Spirituality of the Senses
The Face Is the Icon of Creation
The Holiness of the Gaze
The Infinity of Your Interiority
The Face and the Second Innocence
The Body Is the Angel of the Soul
The Body as Mirror of the Soul
For the Celts, the Visible and the Invisible Are One
The Children of Lir
A Spirituality of Transfiguration
The Senses as Thresholds of Soul
The Eye Is Like the Dawn
Styles of Vision
Taste and Speech
Fragrance and Breath
True Listening Is Worship
The Language of Touch
Celtic Sensuousness
3 Solitude Is Luminous
The World of the Soul Is Secret
The Danger of Neon Vision
To Be Born Is to Be Chosen
The Celtic Underworld as Resonance
To Transfigure the Ego—To Liberate the Soul
There Is No Spiritual Program
The Body Is Your Only Home
The Body Is in the Soul
To Be Natural Is to Be Holy
The Dancing Mind
Beauty Likes Neglected Places
Thoughts Are Our Inner Senses
Ascetic Solitude
Silence Is the Sister of the Divine
The Crowd at the Hearth of the Soul
Contradictions as Treasures
The Soul Adores Unity
Toward a Spirituality of Noninterference
One of the Greatest Sins Is the Unlived Life
4 Work as a Poetics of Growth
The Eye Celebrates Motion
To Grow Is to Change
The Celtic Reverence for the Day
The Soul Desires Expression
Pisreoga
Presence as Soul Texture
Weakness and Power
The Trap of False Belonging
Work and Imagination
Spontaneity and Blockage
The Role Can Smother
Sisyphus
The Salmon of Knowledge
The False Image Can Paralyze
The King and the Beggar’s Gift
Heartful Work Brings Beauty
5 Aging: The Beauty of the Inner Harvest
Time as a Circle
The Seasons in the Heart
Autumn and the Inner Harvest
Transience Makes a Ghost of Experience
Memory: Where Our Vanished Days Secretly Gather
Tír na n-Óg: The Land of Youth
Eternal Time
The Soul as Temple of Memory
Self-Compassion and the Art of Inner Harvesting
To Keep Something Beautiful in Your Heart
The Bright Field
The Passionate Heart Never Ages
The Fire of Longing
Aging: An Invitation to New Solitude
Loneliness: The Key to Courage
Wisdom as Poise and Grace
Old Age and the Twilight Treasures
Old Age and Freedom
6 Death: The Horizon Is in the Well
The Unknown Companion
The Faces of Death in Everyday Life
Death as the Root of Fear
Death in the Celtic Tradition
When Death Visits…
The Caoineadh: The Irish Mourning Tradition
The Soul That Kissed the Body
The Bean Sí
A Beautiful Death
The Dead Are Our Nearest Neighbors
The Ego and the Soul
Death as an Invitation to Freedom
Nothingness: A Face of Death
Waiting and Absence
Birth as Death
Death Transfigures Our Separation
Are Space and Time Different in the Eternal World?
The Dead Bless Us
Further Recommended Reading
About the Author
Other Books by John O’Donohue
Copyright
About the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Diane Reverand, my editor at HarperCollins, for her encouragement and help; Kim Witherspoon and her agency for her belief in my work and its effective mediation; Tami Simon and Michael Taft at Sounds True for their care and support, and Anne Minogue for introducing me; John Devitt, who read the manuscript and offered a thorough, creative, and literary critique; Marian O’Beirn, who read each draft of the manuscript, for her encouragement, invaluable editorial advice, and attention; David Whyte for his brotherly care and generosity; Ellen Wingard for her support and confidence in the work; and my family for all the ordinary magic and laughter! To the landscape and the ancestors; o mo áirde a ug fosca agus solas.
PROLOGUE
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 the opening of the mouth, we bring out sounds from the mountain beneath the soul. These sounds are words. The world is full of words. There are so many talking all the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on television, on radio, in the paper, in books. T
he noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us. We take each other’s sounds and make patterns, predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies. Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the world together. Yet the uttering of the word reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings 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 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 toward reflection. Words are the oblique mirrors that hold your thoughts. You gaze into these word-mirrors and catch glimpses of meaning, belonging, and shelter. Behind their bright surfaces is the dark and the silence. Words are like the god Janus, they face outward and inward 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 an inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is to be 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. Nowhere else is there such intimate and frightening access to the mysterium. Friendship is the sweet grace that liberates us to approach, recognize, and inhabit this adventure. This book is intended as an oblique mirror in which you might come to glimpse the presence and power of inner and outer friendship. Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe. The human journey is a continuous act of transfiguration. If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negative, and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us. As an artist, the human person is permanently active in this revelation. The imagination is the great friend of the unknown. Endlessly, it invokes and releases the power of possibility. Friendship, then, is not to be reduced to an exclusive or sentimental relationship; it is a far more extensive and intensive force.
The Celtic mind was neither discursive nor systematic. Yet in their lyrical speculation the Celts brought the sublime unity of life and experience to expression. The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together. The Celtic imagination articulates the inner friendship that embraces Nature, divinity, underworld, and human world as one. The dualism that separates the visible from the invisible, time from eternity, the human from the divine, was totally alien to them. Their sense of ontological friendship yielded a world of experience imbued with a rich texture of otherness, ambivalence, symbolism, and imagination. For our sore and tormented separation, the possibility of this imaginative and unifying friendship is the Celtic gift.
The Celtic understanding of friendship finds its inspiration and culmination in the sublime notion of the anam ara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul; ara is the word for friend. So anam ara means soul friend. The anam ara was a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam ara, your friendship cut across all convention and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul. Taking this as our inspiration, we explore interpersonal friendship in chapter 1. Central here is the recognition and awakening of the ancient belonging between two friends. Since the birth of the human heart is an ongoing process, love is the continuous birth of creativity within and between us. We will explore longing as the presence of the divine and the soul as the house of belonging.
In chapter 2, we will outline a spirituality of friendship with the body. The body is your clay home, your only home in the universe. The body is in the soul; this recognition confers a sacred and mystical dignity on the body. The senses are divine thresholds. A spirituality of the senses is a spirituality of transfiguration. In chapter 3, we will explore the art of inner friendship. When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected inner wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of the inner landscape.
In chapter 4, we will reflect on work as a poetics of growth. The invisible hungers to become visible, to express itself in our actions. This is the inner desire of work. When our inner life can befriend the outer world of work, new imagination is awakened and great changes take place. In chapter 5, we will contemplate our friendship with the harvest time of life, old age. We will explore memory as the place where our vanished days secretly gather and acknowledge that the passionate heart never ages. Time is veiled eternity. In chapter 6, we will probe our necessary friendship with our original and ultimate companion, death. We will reflect on death as the invisible companion who walks the road of life with us from birth. Death is the great wound in the universe, the root of all fear and negativity. Friendship with our death enables us to celebrate the eternity of the soul, which death cannot touch.
The Celtic imagination loved the circle. It recognized how the rhythm of experience, nature, and divinity followed a circular pattern. In acknowledgment of this, the structure of this book follows a circular rhythm. It begins with a treatment of friendship as awakening, then explores the senses as immediate and creative thresholds. This builds the ground for a positive evaluation of solitude, which in turn seeks expression in the external world of work and action. As our outer energy diminishes, we are faced with the task of aging and dying. This structure follows the circle of life as it spirals toward death and attempts to illuminate the profound invitation it offers.
These chapters circle around a hidden, silent seventh chapter, which embraces the ancient namelessness at the heart of the human self. Here resides the unsayable, the ineffable. In essence, this book attempts a phenomenology of friendship in a lyrical-speculative form. It takes its inspiration from the implied and lyrical metaphysics of Celtic spirituality. Rather than being a piecemeal analysis of Celtic data, it attempts a somewhat broader reflection, an inner conversation with the Celtic imagination, endeavoring to thematize its implied philosophy and spirituality of friendship.
ONE
THE MYSTERY OF FRIENDSHIP
LIGHT IS GENEROUS
If you have ever had occasion to be out early in the morning before the dawn breaks, you will have noticed that the darkest time of night is immediately before dawn. The darkness deepens and becomes more anonymous. If you had never been to the world and never known what a day was, you couldn’t possibly imagine how the darkness breaks, how the mystery and color of a new day arrive. Light is incredibly generous, but also gentle. When you attend to the way the dawn comes, you learn how light can coax the dark. The first fingers of light appear on the horizon, and ever so deftly and gradually, they pull the mantle of darkness away from the world. Quietly before you is the mystery of a new dawn, the new day. Emerson said, “No one suspects the days to be Gods.” It is one of the tragedies of modern culture that we have lost touch with these primal thresholds of nature. The urbanization of modern life has succeeded in exiling us from this fecund kinship with our mother earth. Fashioned from the earth, we are souls in clay form. We need to remain in rhythm with our inner clay voice and longing. Yet this voice is no longer audible in the modern world. We are not even aware of our loss, consequently, the pain of our spiritual exile is more intense in being largely unintelligible.
The world rests in the
night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb-time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night. The dawn is a refreshing time, a time of possibility and promise. All the elements of nature—stones, fields, rivers, and animals—are suddenly there anew in the fresh dawn light. Just as darkness brings rest and release, so the dawn brings awakening and renewal. In our mediocrity and distraction, we forget that we are privileged to live in a wondrous universe. Each day, the dawn unveils the mystery of this universe. Dawn is the ultimate surprise; it awakens us to the immense “thereness” of nature. The wonderful subtle color of the universe arises to clothe everything. This is captured in a phrase from William Blake: “Colours are the wounds of light.” Colors bring out the depth of secret presence at the heart of nature.