It is strange to be here. The Mystery never leaves you alone.
Behind your image, below you 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 our
voices, we bring out sound from the mountain beneath our
soul. These sounds are words. There are so many talking all
the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on radio,
in the paper, in books. The noise of words keeps what we call
the world there for us. We take each other's sounds and make
patterns and predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies. Each
day, our tribe of language holds what we call the 'world' together.
Yet the uttering of the world reveals how each of us relentlessly
creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings out 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 the ancient earth. We are beautifully
molded from this clay. Yet the smallest stone is millions of years
older than us. .....the silent universe seeks echo.
An unknown world aspires towards reflection. Words are oblique
mirrors which hold your thought. You gaze into these word mirrors
and catch glimpses of meaning, belonging shelter. Behind their
bright surfaces is the dark and the silence. Words are like the god
Janus, they face inwards and outwards 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 your inner world. This wholesomeness
is holiness. To be holy is 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.
John O'Donohue
from Anam Cara
~
Photo - Vortex Art
Mystic Meandering
2011