Anam Cara Page 14

  One of the beautiful transitions in nature is the transition from winter to springtime. An old Zen mystic said that when one flower blooms it is spring everywhere. When the first innocent, infantlike flower appears on the earth, one senses nature stirring beneath the frozen surface. There is a lovely phrase in Gaelic, ag borradh, that means there is a quivering life about to break forth. The wonderful colors and the new life the earth receives make spring a time of great exuberance and hope. In a certain sense, spring is the youngest season. Winter is the oldest season. Winter was there from the very beginning. It reigned amidst the silence and bleakness of nature for hundreds of millions of years before vegetation. Spring is a youthful season; it comes forth in a rush of life and promise, hope and possibility. At the heart of the spring, there is a great inner longing. It is the time when desire and memory stir toward each other. Consequently, springtime in your soul is a wonderful time to undertake some new adventure, some new project, or to make some important changes in your life. If you undertake this when it is springtime in your soul, then the rhythm, the energy, and the hidden light of your own clay works with you. You are in the flow of your own growth and potential. Springtime in the soul can be beautiful, hopeful, and strengthening. You can make difficult transitions very naturally in an unforced and spontaneous way.

  Spring blossoms and grows into summertime. In summertime, nature is bedecked with color. There is great lushness everywhere, a richness and depth of texture. Summertime is a time of light, growth, and arrival. You feel that the secret life of the year, hidden in the winter and coming out in the spring, has really blossomed in the summertime. Thus summertime in your soul is a time of great balance. You are in the flow of your own nature. You can take as many risks as you like, and you will always land on your feet. There is enough shelter and depth of texture around you to completely ground, balance, and mind you.

  Summertime grows into autumn, which is one of my favorite times of the year; seeds sown in the spring and nurtured by the summer now yield their fruit in autumn. It is harvest, the homecoming of the seeds’ long and lonely journey through darkness and silence under the earth’s surface. Harvest is one of the great feasts of the year. It was a very important time in Celtic culture. The fertility of the earth yielded its fruitfulness. Correspondingly, when it is autumn in your life, the things that happened in the past, or the experiences that were sown in the clay of your heart, almost unknown to you, now yield their fruit. Autumntime in a person’s life can be a time of great gathering. It is a time for harvesting the fruits of your experiences.

  AUTUMN AND THE INNER HARVEST

  These are the four seasons of the heart. Several seasons can be present simultaneously in the heart, though usually, at any one time, one season is dominant in your life. It is customary to understand autumn as synchronous with old age. In the autumntime of your life, your experience is harvested. This is a lovely backdrop against which we can understand aging. Aging is not merely about the body losing its poise, strength, and self-trust. Aging also invites you to become aware of the sacred circle that shelters your life. Within the harvest circle, you are able to gather lost moments and experiences, bring them together, and hold them as one. In actual fact, if you can come to see aging not as the demise of your body but as the harvest of your soul, you will learn that aging can be a time of great strength, poise, and confidence. To understand the harvest of your soul against the background of seasonal rhythm should give you a sense of quiet delight at the arrival of this time in your life. It should give you strength and a sense of how the deeper belonging of your soul-world will be revealed to you.

  Even though the body ages, diminishes, becomes frail, weak, and ill, the shelter of the soul around the body always embraces that fragility tenderly. That the body is in the soul is a great consolation and shelter. As your body ages, you can become aware of how your soul enfolds and minds your body; and the panic and fear often associated with aging can fall away from you. This can bring you a deeper sense of strength, belonging, and poise. Aging is so frightening because it seems that your autonomy and independence are forsaking you against your will. To the young, old people seem ancient. When you begin to age yourself, you recognize how incredibly quickly time is moving. But the only difference between a young person at the height of their exuberance and a very old person who is frail and physically wasted is time.

  One of the greatest mysteries in life is the mystery of time. Everything that happens to us, happens to us in and through time. Time is the force that brings every new experience to the door of your heart. All that happens to you is controlled and determined by time. The poet Paul Murray speaks of the moment as “the place of pilgrimage to which I am a pilgrim.”

  Time opens up and opens out the mystery of the soul. The transience and the mysteries that time unfolds have always filled me with reverence and wonder. This found expression in one of my poems, called “Cottage”:

  I sit alert

  behind the small window

  of my mind and watch

  the days pass, strangers

  who have no reason to look in.

  Time in this sense can be very frightening. All around the human body is nothingness; that nothingness is the air element. There is no obvious, physical protection around your body, therefore anything can approach you at any time, from any direction. The clear empty air will not stop the arrows of destiny from lodging in your life. Life is incredibly contingent and unexpected.

  TRANSIENCE MAKES A GHOST OF EXPERIENCE

  One of the loneliest aspects of time is transience. Time passes and takes everything away. This can be consoling when you are suffering and going through a lonely, searing time. It is encouraging to be able to say to yourself, This, too, will pass. But the opposite is also true when you are having a lovely time and are really happy; you are with the person you love, and life could not be better. On such a perfect evening or day, you secretly say to your heart, God I wish this could continue forever. But it cannot; this, too, comes to an end. Even Faust begged the moment to stay: “Verweile doch, Du bist so schon”—that is, “Linger awhile, for you are so beautiful.”

  Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night. In this way transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.

  All of our time disappears on us. This is an incredible fact. You are so knitted into a day. You are within it; the day is as close as your skin. It is around your eyes; it is inside your mind. The day moves you, often it can weigh you down; or again it can raise you up. Yet the amazing fact is, this day vanishes. When you look behind you, you do not see your past standing there in a series of day shapes. You cannot wander back through the gallery of your past. Your days have disappeared silently and forever. Your future time has not arrived yet. The only ground of time is the present moment.

  In our culture, we place a great and worthy emphasis on the importance and sacredness of experience. In other words, what you think, believe, or feel remains a fantasy if it does not actually become part of the fabric of your experience. Experience is the touchstone of verification, credibility, and deep intimacy. Yet the future of every experience is its disappearance. This raises a fascinating question: Is there a place where our vanished days secretly gather? As a medieval mystic asked, Where does the light go when the candle is blown out? I believe that there is a place where our vanished days secretly gather. The name of that place is memory.

  MEMORY: WHERE OUR VANISHED DAYS SECRETLY GATHER

  Memory is one of the most beautiful realities of the soul. Since the body itself is so linked into the visual sense it often does not recognize memory as the place where the past is gathered. The most powerful image of memory is the tree. I rem
ember seeing once at the Museum of Natural History in London a sliver of the diameter of a giant redwood from California. This tree’s memory reached back to about the fifth century. The memory rings within the diameter of the tree had little white flags at different points documenting the age of the particular memory ring. The first one was St. Colmcille going to Iona in the sixth century, then up along the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on up to the twentieth century. This giant redwood had lived through fourteen or fifteen centuries of time. Its great memory had unfolded all that time within the texture of its timber.

  In the classical tradition, the most beautiful evocation of the power, presence, and riches of memory is in book 10 of St. Augustine’s confession. The following passage is splendid in its portrayal of the inner world.

  Great is the power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God, a spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost depth? Yet it is a faculty of soul and belongs to my nature. In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself but where can the part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside itself and not within? As this question struck I was overcome with wonder and almost stupor. Here are men going afar to marvel at the heights of the mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movement of the stars, yet leaving themselves, unnoticed and not seeing it as marvelous that when I spoke of all these things, I did not see them with my eyes, yet I could not have spoken of them unless these mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and the ocean of which I have heard, had been inwardly present to my sight: in my memory, yet with the same vast spaces between them as if I saw them outside me.

  One of the great poverties of our modern culture of rapidity, stress, and externality is that there is so little attention to memory. The computer industry has hijacked the notion of memory. To say that computers have memory is false. A computer has storage and recall. Human memory is, however, more refined, sacred, and personal. Memory has its own inner selectivity and depth. Human memory is an inner temple of feeling and sensibility. Within that temple different experiences are grouped according to their particular feeling and shape. Our time suffers from a great amnesia. The American philosopher Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

  The beauty and invitation of old age offer a time of silence and solitude for a visit to the house of your inner memory. You can revisit all of your past. Your soul is the place where your memory lives. Since linear time vanishes, everything depends on memory. In other words, our time comes in yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows. Yet there is another place within us that lives in eternal time. That place is called the soul. The soul, therefore, lives mainly in the mode of eternity. This means that as things happen in your yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows and fall away with transience, they fall and are caught and held by the net of the eternal in your soul. There they are gathered, preserved, and minded for you. Levinas says, “Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.” Consequently, as your body ages and gets weaker, your soul is in fact getting richer, deeper, and stronger. With time your soul grows more sure of itself; the natural light within it increases and brightens. There is a beautiful poem by the wonderful Czeslaw Milosz on old age called “A New Province.” This is the last verse:

  I would prefer to be able to say: “I am satiated,

  What is given to taste in this life, I have tasted.”

  But I am like someone in a window who draws aside a curtain

  To look at a feast he does not comprehend.

  TÍR NA N-ÓG: THE LAND OF YOUTH

  The Celtic tradition had a wonderful sense of the way eternal time is woven through our human time. There is the lovely story of Oisín, who was one of the Fianna, a band of Celtic warriors. He was tempted to visit the land called Tír na n-Óg, which is the land of eternal youth, where the good people, the fairy people, lived. Oisín went off with them, and for a long, long time he lived happily there with his woman, Niamh Cinn Oir, known as Niamh of the golden hair. The time seemed so short to him, being a time of great joy. The quality of our experience always determines the actual rhythm of time. When you are in pain, every moment slows down until it resembles a week. When you are happy and really enjoying your life, time flies. Oisin’s time passed really quickly in the land of Tír na n-Óg. Then his longing for his old life began to gnaw. He began to wonder how the Fianna were, and what was happening in Ireland. He began to long for home, the land of Éire. The fairy people discouraged him because they knew that as a former inhabitant of mortal and linear time, he would be in danger of getting lost there forever. Nevertheless, he decided to return. They gave him a beautiful white horse and told him never to dismount. If he did, he would be lost. He came on the great white horse back to the land of Ireland. Greater loneliness awaited him when he discovered that he had been gone for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Fianna had disappeared. He consoled himself by visiting their old hunting sites and the places where they had feasted, sung, recited old stories, and achieved great feats of valor. In the meantime, Christianity had come to Ireland. When Oisín was riding around on his white horse, he saw a group of men failing as they attempted to raise a big rock to build a church. Being a warrior, he had wonderful strength, and he looked at them and longed to help them; but he knew he dare not dismount from the horse; if he did, he was lost. He watched them from a distance for a while, then he rode nearer. He could not resist any longer. He took his foot out of the stirrup and reached under the rock to raise it up for them, but as soon as he did, the girth broke, the saddle turned over, and Oisín hit the ground. The very moment hé hit the land of Ireland, he became a feeble, wrinkled old man. This is a wonderful story to show the coexistence of the two levels of time. If you broke the threshold that the fairies observed between these two levels of time, you ended up stranded in mortal, linear time. The destination of human time is death. Eternal time is unbroken presence.

  ETERNAL TIME

  This story also shows that there is a different rhythm of life in eternal time. One night, a man from our village was coming back home along a road where there were no houses. Cycling along, he heard beautiful music. The music was coming from inside the wall by the sea. He crossed over the wall to find that he was entering a village in this forsaken place. The people there seemed to have expected him. They seemed to know him; and he received a great welcome. He was given drink and delicious food. Their music was more beautiful than he had ever heard before. He spent a few hours of great happiness there. Then he remembered that if he did not return home, they would be out searching for him. He bade farewell to the villagers. When he arrived home, he discovered that he had been missing for a fortnight even though it had seemed like half an hour in the eternal, fairy world.

  My father used to tell another such story about a monk named Phoenix, who one day in the monastery was reading his breviary. A bird began to sing, and the monk listened so purely to the song of the bird that he was aware of nothing else. Then the song stopped, and he took up his breviary and went back into the monastery to discover that he no longer recognized anyone there. And they did not recognize him either. He named all his fellow monks with whom he had lived up to what seemed half an hour before, but they had all disappeared. The new monks looked up their annals, and sure enough, years and years before, a monk Phoenix had mysteriously disappeared. At the metaphorical level, this story claims that through real presence the monk Phoenix had actually broken into eternal time. Eternal time moves in a different rhythm from normal, broken human time. Oscar Wilde said, “We think in eternity but we move slowly through time.” This beautiful phrase echoes powerfully because it comes from “De Profundis,” Wilde’s letter of love and forgiveness to one who betrayed and destroyed him.

  These Celtic fairy stories suggest a region of the soul that inhabits the eternal. There is an eternal region withi
n us where we are not vulnerable to the ravages of normal time. Shakespeare expressed the ravages of calendar time beautifully in Sonnet 60:

  Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

  so do our minutes hasten to their end

  each changing place with that which goes before

  in sequent toil all forwards do contend.

  THE SOUL AS TEMPLE OF MEMORY

  The Celtic stories suggest that time as the rhythm of soul has an eternal dimension where everything is gathered and minded. Here nothing is lost. This is a great consolation: The happenings in your life do not disappear. Nothing is ever lost or forgotten. Everything is stored within your soul in the temple of memory. Therefore, as an old person, you can happily go back and attend to your past time; you can return through the rooms of that temple, visit the days that you enjoyed and the times of difficulty where you grew and refined yourself. Old age, as the harvest of life, is a time when your times and their fragments gather. In this way, you unify yourself and achieve a new strength, poise, and belonging that was never available to you when you were distractedly rushing through your days. Old age is a time of coming home to your deeper nature, of entering fully into the temple of your memory where all your vanished days are secretly gathered and awaiting you.

  The idea of memory was very important in Celtic spirituality. There are lovely prayers for different occasions. There are prayers for the hearth, for kindling the fire, and for smooring the hearth. At night, the ashes were smoored over the burning coals, sealing off the air. The next morning the coals would still be alive and burning. There is also a lovely prayer for the hearth keepers that evokes St. Bridget, who was both a pagan Celtic goddess and a Christian saint. In herself, Bridget focuses the two worlds easily and naturally. The pagan world and the Christian world have no row with each other in the Irish psyche, rather they come close to each other in a lovely way. This is a nice prayer for the hearth that also recognizes memory: