Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

by John O'Donohue

There is a voice within you that no one, not even you, has ever heard. Give yourself the opportunity of silence and begin to develop your listening in order to hear, deep...

that interim world between the invisible and the visible. This is referred to in scholarship as the imaginal world, the world where the angels live.

For millions of years, an ancient conversation has continued between the chorus of the ocean and the silence of the stone.

The Celtic mind had a wonderful respect for the mystery of the circle and the spiral. The circle is one of the oldest and most powerful symbols. The world is a circle; the sun and moon are too. Even time itself has a circular nature; the day and the year build to a circle. At its most intimate level so is the life of each individual. The circle never gives itself completely to the eye or to the mind but offers a trusting hospitality to that which is complex and mysterious; it embraces depth and height together. The circle never reduces the mystery to a single direction or preference.

The world of the soul is secret. The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected, the sacred vanishes.

The light of modern consciousness is not gentle or reverent; it lacks graciousness in the presence of mystery; it wants to unriddle and control the unknown.

It bypasses the knottedness of narcissistic, self-reflexive language to create a lucid shape of words through which the numinous depths of nature and divinity can glisten.

It is in the depths of your life that you will discover the invisible necessity that has brought you here.

the ebb and flow of the tides is alive in the ebb and flow of our breathing.

Place is not simply location. A place is a profound individuality. Its surface texture of grass and stone is blessed by rain, wind, and light. With complete attention, landscape celebrates the liturgy of the seasons, giving itself unreservedly to the passion of the goddess.

The shape of a landscape is an ancient and silent form of consciousness. Mountains are huge contemplatives. Rivers and streams offer voice; they are the tears of the earth’s joy and despair.

Dogen

The person is no simple, one-dimensional self. There is a labyrinth within the soul. What we think and desire often comes into conflict with what we do. Below the surface of our conscious awareness, a vast, unknown rootage determines our actions.

The eternal is at home—within you. The eternal is not elsewhere; it is not distant. There is nothing as near as the eternal.

Familiarity enables us to tame, control, and ultimately forget the mystery.

Familiarity is one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation.

In a book of conversations with P. A. Mendoza, a Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez, when asked about his thirty-year relationship with his wife, Mercedes, said, “I know her so well now that I have not the slightest idea who she really is.”

The first step in awakening to your inner life and to the depth and promise of your solitude would be to consider yourself for a little while as a stranger to your own deepest depths.

the soul is imaginative.

Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation.

We put terrible pressure on our minds. When we tighten them or harden our views or beliefs, we lose all the softness and flexibility that makes for real shelter, belonging, and protection. Sometimes the best way of caring for your soul is to make flexible again some of the views that harden and crystalize your mind; for these alienate you from your own depth and beauty. Creativity seems to demand flexible and measured tension.

When you inhabit your solitude fully and experience its outer extremes of isolation and abandonment, you will find that at its heart there is neither loneliness nor emptiness but intimacy and shelter.

The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life. In a vital sense, perception is reality.

Phenomenology has shown us that all consciousness is consciousness of something. The world is never simply there outside us. Our intentionality constructs it.

Our intentionality constructs the landscapes of our inner world. Maybe it is time now for a phenomenology of soul.

silence is one of the great victims of modern culture.

The inner world of the soul is suffering a great eviction by the landlord forces of advertising and external social reality.

One of the reasons so many people are suffering from stress is not that they are doing stressful things but that they allow so little time for silence.

all words come out of silence. Words that have a depth, resonance, healing, and challenge to them are words loaded with ascetic silence.

There is so little patience for the silence from which words emerge or for the silence that is between words and within them. When we forget or neglect this silence, we empty our world of its secret and subtle presences.

Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.

At the deepest level of the human heart, there is no simple, singular self. Deep within, there is a gallery of different selves. Each one of these figures expresses a different part of your nature.

It is startling that we desperately hold on to what makes us miserable. Our own woundedness becomes a source of perverse pleasure and fixes our identity. We do not want to be cured, for that would mean moving into the unknown.

When you stand before a painting by Kandinsky, you enter the church of color where the liturgy of contradiction is fluent and glorious.

Every person has certain qualities or presences in their heart that are awkward, disturbing, and negative. One of your sacred duties is to exercise kindness toward them. In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualities. Your kindness will slowly poultice their negativity, alleviate their fear, and help them to see that your soul is a home where there is no judgment or febrile hunger for a fixed and limited identity.

Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.

This liturgy of remembrance, literally re-membering, is always at work within you.

A day is precious because each day is essentially the microcosm of your whole life. Each new day offers possibilities and promises that were never seen before. To engage with honor the full possibility of your life is to engage in a worthy way the possibility of your new day.

Most of us work for someone else and lose so much of our energy. As a matter of fact, one of the definitions of energy is the ability to do work. Days spent caged make us tired and weary. In a city, all the morning traffic jams hold people who are barely out of the night and are sleepy, anxious, and frustrated. Pressure and stress have already stolen their day. In the evening, the same people are weary after a long workday. By the time they get home, they have no energy left to the desires, thoughts, and feelings that were neglected all day.

The recovery of soul means a rediscovery of Otherness; this would awaken again the sense of mystery, possibility, and compassion.

You should never belong fully to something that is outside yourself. It is very important to find a balance in your belonging. You should never belong totally to any cause or system. People frequently need to belong to an external system because they are afraid to belong to their own lives.

Often people’s identities, that wild inner complexity of soul and color of spirit, become shrunken into their work identities. They become prisoners of their roles. They limit and reduce their lives. They become

seduced by the practice of self-absence. They move further and further away from their own lives. They are forced backward into hidden areas on the ledges of their hearts. When you encounter them, you meet only the role.

A breakdown is often a desperate attempt by the soul to break through the weary facade of role politics.

There is a profundity to the human soul that the linear surface of the work world cannot accommodate.

the linear mind, despite its sincerity and commitment, can totally miss the gift.

The imagination in its loyalty to possibility often takes the curved path rather than the linear way.

Sometimes a person has difficulty with work, not because the work is unsuited to him, or he to it, but because his image of the work is blurred and defective.

Frequently, such a person lacks a focus and has allowed the tender presence of his experience to become divided and split. His sense of his work as expression and imagination has been replaced by an image of work as endurance and entrapment.

What you do should be worthy of you; it should be worthy of your attention and dignity, and conform to your respect for yourself. If you can love what you do, then you will do it beautifully.

You might not love your work at the beginning; yet the deeper side of your soul can help you bring the light of love to what you do. Then, regardless of what you do, you will do it in a creative and transforming way.