The Challenge of Illness - John O'Donohue

We never value or even see some things in our lives until we
are just about to lose them.  This is particularly true of health.
When we are in good health, we are so busy in the world that
we never notice how well we are.  Illness comes and challenges
everything about us.  It unmasks all pretense.
When you are really ill, you cannot mask it.

Illness also tests the inner fiber and luminosity of the soul. 

Illness focuses us onto our "inner landscape", into resting
deeply in the inner silence of the Soul.  It is a remedial silence
that allows us to endure, to move through, but not necessarily
getting rid of the illness.  We can't have an agenda - only the 
deep acceptance of the companion - and learn to navigate it.

John O'Donohue
From - Eternal Echoes

~

Photo of Soft Sunset taken by my brother :)

 

Crossing the Threshold - John O'Donohue - for Solstice...

The following piece is an excerpt from a book called 
To Bless the Space Between Us, by Irish poet, philosopher,
author and priest, John O'Donohue

Sara Smeaten shares his words about what it means to move
from one experience to another, to cross into new ways of being,
what it means to end one thing and begin another, and 
ultimately, what it means to trust in the possibility that each
new threshold offers.

He reminds us that change has its own rhythm, its own course...
That it is happening even when we can't see it, and that it
can also be sudden and absolute.  His words are magical
and yet deeply practical

Sara Smeaton

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Change arrives in nature when time has ripened.  There are no
jagged transitions or crude discontinuities.  This accounts for the
sureness with which one season succeeds another.  It is as though
they were moving forward in a rhythm set from within a continuum.

So often we opt to continue the old pattern, rather than risking the
danger of difference.  We are also often surprised by change that
seems to arrive out of nowhere.

We find ourselves crossing some new threshold we had never
anticipated.  Like Spring secretly at work within the heart of winter,
below the surface of our lives huge changes are in fermentation.
We never suspect a thing.  Then when the grip of some long-
enduring winter mentality begins to loosen, we find ourselves
vulnerable to a flourish of possibility and we are suddenly
negotiating the challenge of a threshold.

To acknowledge and cross a new threshold is always a challenge.
It demands courage and also a sense of trust in whatever is
emerging.  This becomes essential when a threshold opens suddenly
in front of you, one for which you had no preparation [or choice].
This could be illness, suffering or loss.  Because we are so engaged
with the world, we usually forget how fragile life can be and how
vulnerable we always are.  It takes only a couple of seconds for
a life to change irreversibly.  Suddenly you stand on completely
strange ground and a new course of life has to be embraced.

Especially at such times we desperately need blessing and
protection.  You look back at the life you have lived up to a few
hours before, and it suddenly seems to far away.  Think for a 
moment how, across the world, someone's life has just changed -
irrevocably, permanently, and not necessarily for the better -
and everything that was once so steady, so reliable, must now
find a new way of unfolding...

.....we never know what destiny shapes each life.  The script of
individual destiny is secret; it is hidden behind and beneath the
sequence of happenings that is continually unfolding for us.
Each life is a mystery that is never finally available to the
mind's light or questions. Acceptance of this can free us into
natural courage that casts out fear and opens up our lives to
become voyages of discovery, creativity, and compassion.
No threshold need be a threat, but rather an invitation and a
promise.

.....listen inward with complete attention until you hear the
inner voice calling your forward.  The time has come to cross.

John O'Donohue
via Sara Smeaten

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the Universe there are things that are
known and things that are unknown and
in between there are doors.

William Blake

~

Solstice Blessings
as we cross the threshold today

~

Photo - A panoramic view of the Gloucester coast in Mass
Taken by my brother.

It reminded me of a threshold, or an opening/door to 
something beyond...

 

Soul Friend - John O'Donohue

In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding
of love and friendship.  One of the fascinating ideas here
is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is
anam cara.  Anam is the Gaelic word for Soul and cara
is the word for friend.  So anam cara in the Celtic world
was "soul friend."

In everyone's life, there is a great need for an anam cara,
a soul friend.  In this love, you are understood as you are
without mask or pretension.  The superficial and functional
lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you
can be as you really are.  Love allows understanding to
dawn, and understanding is precious.  Where you are
understood, you are at home.

The anam cara experience opens a friendship that is not
wounded or limited by separation or distance.  Such
friendship can remain alive even when the friends live
far away from each other.  Because they have broken
through the barriers of persona and egoism to the soul
level, the unity of their souls is not easily severed.  When
the soul is awakened, physical space is transfigured.

Even across the distance, two friends can stay attuned to
each other and continue to sense the flow of each other's
lives.  With your anam cara you awaken the eternal.

John O'Donohue

~

Photo from the Internet

 

The Haunted Room - John O'Donohue

The way you think about your life can turn your soul into a 
haunted room.  You are afraid to risk going in there anymore.
Your fantasy peoples this room of the heart with sad presences,
which ultimately become disturbing and sinister.

The haunted room in the mind installs lonesomeness at the heart
of your life.  It would be devastating in the autumn of your life
to look back and recognize that you had created a series of
haunted rooms in your heart.

Fear and negativity are immense forces, which constantly tussle
with us.  They long to turn the mansions of the soul into a totally
haunted house.  These are the living conditions for which fear 
and negativity long, and in which they thrive.

We were sent here to live life to the full.  When you manage to be
generous in your passion and vulnerability, life always comes to
bless you.  Had you but the courage to acknowledge the haunted
inner room, turn the key, and enter, you would encounter nothing
strange or sinister there.

You would meet some vital self of yours that you had banished
during a time of pain and difficulty.  Sometimes, when life
squeezes you into lonely crevices, you may have to decide between
survival and breaking apart.  At such times, you can be harsh with
yourself and settle to be someone other than who you really long
to be.  At such a time, you can do nothing else; you have to survive.

But your soul always remains faithful to your longing to become
who you really are.  The banished self from an earlier time of life
remains within you waiting to be released and integrated.  The
soul has its own logic of loyalty and concealment.

Ironically, it is usually in its most awkward rooms that the special
blessings and healing are locked away.

Your thinking can also freeze and falsify the flow of your life's
continuity to make you a prisoner of routine and judgement.

John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
image from light on the ceiling
through the top of a lamp shade...

 

Inner World - John O'Donohue

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

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Vortex Art
Mystic Meandering

2011

 

Blessing for the Interim Time - John O'Donohue

When near the end of day, life has drained
Out of light, and it is too soon
For the mind of night to have darkened things,

No place looks like itself, loss of outline
Makes everything look strangely in-between,
Unsure of what has been, or what might come.

In this wan light, even trees seem groundless.
In a while it will be night, but nothing
Here seems to believe the relief of darkness.

You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.

The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.

The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.

You cannot lay claim to anything;

In this place of dusk,
Your eyes are blurred;
And there is no mirror.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust;
You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in the false ground,
That you might come free
From all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here [is] your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.

John O'Donohue

from - To Bless the Space Between Us

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Blessing - John O'Donohue

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 grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green 
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach 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.

John O'Donohue

written for his Mother
Original title "Beannacht - A New Year Blessing

~

One of the profound things that O'Donohue's
work suggests is that blessing doesn't erase difficulty,
but rather reaches deeper.  In his essay he argues:

"It [blessing] is not the invention of what is not there,
nor the glazed-eye belief that the innocent energy of goodwill
can alter what is destructive...   Blessing.....issues from the
confident depth of the hidden Self...  When you bless someone,
you literally call the force of their infinite Self into action."

Giving blessings relies on a double capacity.  Its task is to
simultaneously look outward and honor the reality of what is
happening, while looking inward to name the inner experience
and resources within, to make visible the invisible world...

...blessing is gratitude made manifest...

From an Essay by Brittany Deininger MA in theology
and Culture Alumni

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 
 

Inner Life - John O'Donohue

The visible world is only the shoreline of the magnificent
ocean of the invisible.  The invisible is not empty, but is
textured and tense with presences [energies].  These
presences cannot be named; they can only be sensed, not seen.

When you name a dimension of your experience, one of your
qualities or difficulties...you give it an identity.  It then responds
to you according to the tone of its name... 

The wildness of the invisible world is nameless.  It has no name.
A first step towards reawakening respect for your inner life
may be to become aware of the private collage of dead names
you have for your inner life.  Often the experiences of
wilderness can return us to the nameless wildness within.  
Sometimes, go away to a wild place of your own. Leave
your name and the grid of intentions and projects and images
which mark you out as citizen Z.  Leave it all and let yourself
just slip back into the rhythms of your intimate wildness.[rhythm]
You will be surprised at the lost terrains, wells, and mountains
that you will rediscover,  territories which have been buried
under well-meant but dead names.  To go beyond confinement
is to rediscover yourself.

John O'Donohue
from Eternal Echoes

~

Photo taken by my brother
Plum Cove Gloucester MA

 

Thresholds - John O'Donohue

Like Spring secretly at work within the heart of Winter,
below the surface of our lives
huge changes are in fermentation.
We never suspect a thing.
Then when the grip of some
long-enduring winter mentality
begins to loosen,
we find ourselves
vulnerable
to
a
flourish
of
possibility

and we are suddenly negotiating
the challenges

of
a threshold...

At any time you can ask yourself:
At which threshold am I now standing?
At this time in my life, what am I leaving?
Where am I about to enter?

A threshold is not simply a boundary;
it is a frontier
that divides two different territories,
rhythms, and atmosphere.

Indeed, it is a lovely testimony
to the fullness and integrity
of an experience or a stage of life
that intensifies toward the end
into a real frontier
that cannot be crossed without
the heart being passionately
engaged
and
woken up.

At this threshold
a great complexity of emotion
comes alive:

confusion,
fear,
excitement,
sadness,
hope.

This is one of the reasons
such vital crossings
were always clothed in ritual.

It is wise in your own life
to be able to recognize and acknowledge
the key thresholds;
to take your time;
to feel all the varieties of presence
that accrue here;
to listen inward
with complete attention
until you hear
the inner voice

calling you
forward:

The time has come
to cross.

John O'Donohue
Excerpts from: To Bless the Space Between Us
(I put the excerpts into prose poem format)

~

...I find myself navigating the challenges of a major
threshold - an unexpected visitor has arrived, creating
an unexpected threshold and transition in life -
from a fairly quiet, slower paced, contemplative lifestyle,
now thrown into the role of a caregiver for a sibling, who
requires my constant attention - while the TV runs all
day long; background noise to a life thrown into chaos

I am having to find my own little quiet sanctuary both within
myself and in the house; as my house is no longer
my "sanctuary."

My life is cluttered with noise - full of distractions and
interruptions that muddle the mind with the over-stimulation.

And I wonder, why I must cross this particular threshold at this
time in my life - my elder years.  And how do I navigate and
negotiate the challenges that are being presented and still
maintain a sense of sanity...

It has been a difficult threshold for sure: exhausted and
stressed most of the time - unable to keep up the pace;
needing to remember to "step back", to disengage from the
emotions that are rising up, and bring my attention to the
Essence of my own Being; not allowing the stress and
anxiety to engulf me - and the new way I am living -
which is so foreign to my own rhythm with life,
and with my soul...

I know many of you out there have been "caregivers" for
a family member.  I would be interested in hearing your experience
 and how you were able to transition into a new way of living
without losing yourself - your own rhythms with life...

You can email me at:
mysticmeandering@gmail.com

_/\_

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

A Vessel For Blessing - John O'Donohue

May morning be astir withe the harvest of night;
Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,
Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse
That cut right through the surface to Source.

May this be a morning of innocent beginning,
When the gift within you slips clear
Of the sticky web of the personal
With its hurt and its hauntings,
And fixed fortress corners.

A morning when you become a pure vessel
For what wants to ascend from Silence.

May your imagination know
The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,
and the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all
The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields
And something original begins
To stir toward your senses
And grow stronger in your heart

In order to come to birth
In a clean line of form,
That claims from time
A rhythm not yet heard,
That calls space to
A different shape.

May it be its own force field
And dwell uniquely
Between the heart and the light

To surprise the hungry eye
By how deftly it fits
About its secret loss.

John O'Donohue
From - To Bless The Space Between Us
Original title: "Blessing for Artists at the Start of the Day"

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Commentary by Brittany Deninger:

One of the things that O'Donohue's exquisite blessings suggest is that blessing doesn't erase difficulty, but rather reaches deeper.  [Blessing] he says, is not the invention of what is not there, nor the glaze-eyed belief that the innocent energy of goodwill can alter what is destructive.  Blessing.....issues from the confident depth of the hidden self, and its vision and force can transform what is deadlocked, numbed, and inevitable.  When you bless someone, you literally call the force of their infinite self into action.

The hope of a blessing is that we reach for language that is large enough to hold and welcome the full range of human experience. ...our hardships are an inevitable part of the story.  Our difficult experiences are our teachers that mark us and make us. ...the words that pass between us have potential to invite and to invoke.  Our words can clear a path for the depth of another soul to emerge.  The central gesture of a blessing is presence calling to presence.

Brittany Deninger
Asst. Instructor in Theology and Culture
Excerpt from an essay entitled: "The Art of Blessing", posted in the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology Website

 

In Rhythm With Your Soul - John O'Donohue

Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity.

You should belong first in your own interiority.  If you belong,
and if you are in rhythm with yourself and connected to that
deep, unique source within, then you will never be vulnerable
when your outside belonging is qualified, relativised, or taken
away.  You will still be able to stand.....on the ground of your
soul where you are not a tenant, where you are at home.

John O'Donohue
From: Anam Cara

I think that we are infinitely greater than our minds and we are

infinitely more than our images of ourselves.  One of the sad
things today is that so many people are frightened by the
wonder of their own presence.  They are dying to tie themselves
into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined
identity that other people have actually settled on for them.
This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies
that are rising inside their souls.  Many of us get very afraid
and we eventually compromise.  We settle for something that
is safe, rather than engaging the danger and wildness that is
in our own hearts

John O'Donohue
From: Walking in Wonder

With thanks to Whiskey River

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Cracked Open by Illness - Jeff Foster

Just because someone manages a  smile today, or seems to hold
a positive outlook, or cracks a little joke, or convinces you that
they're okay, doesn't mean they're okay.

The experience of being on the inside of chronic illness has
completely cracked me open to a deeper compassion for
all my brothers and sisters.

I have no idea what anyone is going through, under their facade,
their mask, their personality, their brilliant defences, the 
"positive" or "spiritual" outfit they wear to survive.

They are trying to survive in the only way they know how.

Spiritual teachers and their students, therapist and their clients,
priests, philosophers, life coaches, world authorities, saints
and sinners - they are all in pain.

We are ALL trying to survive the only way we know how.

Let's be a little kinder to each other.  Forgive each other for
our masks, our awkwardness, our closed hearts, our weirdness.
Go beyond surfaces.

Sometimes we are not okay,
and that's okay.

As Ram Dass said, "we are all walking each other home..."

Jeff Foster

As some of you know know Jeff Foster has been very ill
since last July with debilitating Neurological Lyme Disease
that impacted him, not only physically but emotionally.

~

You may also be interested in reading a poem by Danna Faulds
on illness, called What Remains.

Or read John O'Donohue's piece on The Challenge of Illness

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

For One Who Is Exhausted - John O'Donohue

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight.

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken in the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness takes over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.

Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

John O'Donohue
From - To Bless The Space Between Us

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Cosmic Dream - John O'Donohue

In the beginning was the dream...
In the eternal night where no dawn broke, the dream deepened. 
Before anything ever was, it had to be dreamed...  Every single
thing is somehow the expression and incarnation of thought.

If we take Nature as the great artist of longing, then all presences
in the world have emerged from Her mind and imagination.  We
are children of the Earth's dreams.  It's almost as if Nature is in
dream and we are her children who have broken through the dawn
into time and place.  Fashioned in the dreaming of the clay, we
are always somehow haunted by that, we are unable ever finally
to decide what is dream and what is reality.  Each day we live in
what we call reality, yet life seems to resemble a dream.  We rush
through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to
stay and the serious project of the world depended on us.  We
worry and grow anxious - we magnify trivia until they become
important enough to control our lives.  Yet all the time, we have
forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of
a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos.

There is no definitive dividing line between reality and dream.
What we consider real is often precariously dream-like.  And
even our grip on reality is tenuous...

John O'Donohue
From: Eternal Echoes

Photo from the Internet

 

A Liturgy of Light - & Suffering - John O'Donohue

 When suffering comes, we feel panic and fear.
Frightened, we want to hide. You want to climb up some high
ledge to escape dismemberment of this acidic tide.

Yet the strange thing is: the more you resist, the longer it stays.
The more intensely you endeavor to depart the ground of pain,
the more firmly you remain fixed there.

It is difficult to be gentle with yourself when you are suffering.
Gentleness helps you to stop resisting the pain that is visiting you.

When you stop resisting suffering, something else begins to happen.
You begin slowly to allow your suffering to follow its own logic.
The assumption here is that suffering does not visit you gratuitously.
There is in suffering some hidden shadowed light.

Destiny has a perspective on us and our pathway that we can never
fully glimpse; it alone knows why suffering comes.  Suffering has
its own reasoning.

It wants to teach us something.  When you stop resisting its dark
work, you are open to learning what it wants to show you. 

Often, we learn most deeply and receive profoundly from the black,
lonely tide of pain.  We often see in Nature how pruning strengthens.
Fruit trees look so wounded after being pruned, yet the limitation
of this cutting forces the tree to fill and flourish.  Similarly with
drills of potatoes when they are raised, earth is banked up around
them and seems to smother them. Yet as the days go by the stalks
grow stronger.

Suffering can often become a time of pruning. Though it is sore
and cuts into us, later we may become aware that this dark 
suffering was secretly a liturgy of light...

John O'Donohue
from: Eternal Echoes

With thanks to - The Beauty We Love

P.S.  I also substitute the world struggle for suffering -
same thing, only on a different level

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Unknown Self - John O'Donohue

[.....]

It presides within like an evening freedom
That will often see you enchanted by twilight
Without ever recognizing the falling night,...

...It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease
That is not ruffled by disappointment,
It presides in a deeper current of time
Free from the force of cause and sequence
That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,
Its dark light might quench your mind
For it knows how your primeval heart
Sisters every cell of your life
To all your known mind would avoid.

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,
Offering you only discreet glimpses
Of how you construct your life.

At times it will lead you strangely,
Magnetized by some resonance
That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night
As the poet who draws your dreams,
Creating for you many secret doors
Decorated with pictures of your hunger.

It has the dignity of the angelic
That knows you to your roots,
Always awaiting your deeper befriending
To take you beyond the threshold of want,
Where all your diverse strainings
Can come to wholesome ease.

John O'Donohue
Excerpt from "The Unknown Self"
from - Benedictus - A Book of Blessings

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Survivors of Solitude - John O'Donohue

They are to be admired those survivors
of solitude who have gone with no maps
into the room without features,
where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,
no path of danger to a cold summit
to look back on and feel exuberant,
no clarity of territories yet untouched
that tremble near the human breath,
no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores
to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,
no friendship of other explorers
drawn into the dream of the unknown.

No.  They do not belong to the outside worship
of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior
space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,
where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human
and a poultice of silence pulls every sound
out of circulation down into the ground,
where in the panic of being, each breath unravels
an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind,
shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost...
...and the end of all exploring is the relentless
arrival at an ever novel nowhere.

John O'Donohue
From: Echoes of Memory

Original title - "Nowhere"

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Regaining the Rhythm of "Self" - John O'Donohue

When you regain a sense of your life as a journey of discovery,
you return to rhythm with your self.  When you take the time
to travel with reverence, a richer life unfolds before you.
Moments of beauty begin to braid your days.  When your
mind becomes more acquainted with reverence, the light,
grace and elegance of beauty find you more frequently.
When the destination becomes gracious, the journey
becomes an adventure of beauty.

John O'Donohue
Excerpt from: Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

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Photo - Mystic Meandering

                                                                                        

Kindness casts a different light - John O'Donohue

There is a kindness that dwells deep down in things;
it presides everywhere, often in the places we least
expect.  The world can be harsh and negative, but
if we remain generous, and patient, kindness inevitably
reveals itself.  Something deep in the human soul seems
to depend on the presence of kindness; something
instinctive in us expects it, and once we sense it we
are able to trust and open ourselves...

If we did not feel that some ultimate kindness holds
sway, we would feel like outsiders confronted on every
side by a world toward which we could make no real bridges.

The word kindness has a gentle sound that seems to echo
the presence of compassionate goodness.  When someone
is kind to you, you feel understood and seen.  There is no
judgment or harsh perception directed toward you.

Kindness has gracious eyes; it also suggests that your
vulnerability, though somehow exposed, is not taken
advantage of; rather, it has become an occasion for dignity
and empathy.

Kindness casts a different light, an evening light that has
the depth of color and patience to illuminate what is
complex and rich in difference.

Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the
instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate
kindness holds sway.  This is the heart of blessing.  To believe
in blessing is to believe that our being here, our very presence
in the world, is itself the first gift, the primal blessing.

Given the nature of our beginning [our birth] - nowhere does
 the Silence of the Infinite lean so intensely as around the form
of  a newly born infant - it is no wonder  that our hearts are
imbued with longing for beauty, meaning, order, creativity,
compassion, and love.  

John O'Donohue
From: To Bless the Sapce Between Us

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Photo - Mystic Meandering

An Inner Whisper - John O'Donohue

Human identity is complex.  Nothing is ever given simply
or immediately.  Even the simplest act of perception has
many layers... Time and memory often reveal things later
that were staring us in the eye, but we never noticed them.
The quest for the truth of things is never ending.  Every
experience is open to countless readings and interpretations.
We never see a thing completely.  In sure anticipation, our
eyes have always already altered what awaits our gaze.
The search for truth is difficult and uncomfortable.  Because
the mystery is too much for us, we may opt to settle for
the surface of things.  Comfort becomes more important than
true presence.  This is precisely why we need to hear the
discerning voice.

Somewhere in every heart there is a discerning voice.  This
voice distrusts the status quo.  It sounds out the falsity in
things and encourages the dissent from the images things
tend to assume.  It underlines the secret crevices where the
surface has become strained.  It advises distance and opens
up a new perspective through which the concealed meaning
 of a situation might emerge... Its intention is to keep the heart
clean and clear.  This voice is an inner whisper not obvious or
known to others outside...  Yet much depends on that small
voice.  The truth of its whisper marks the line between honor
and egoism, kindness and chaos.  In extreme situations,
which have been emptied of all shelter and tenderness,
that small voice whispers from somewhere beyond and
encourages the heart to hold out for dignity, respect, beauty
and love.  That whisper brings forgotten nobility into an arena
where violence has traduced everything.  This faithful voice
can illuminate the dark lands of despair.  It becomes both the
sign and presence of a transcendence that no force or horror
can extinguish.  Each day in the world, in the prisons, hospitals
and killing fields, against all the odds, this still, small voice
continues to echo the beauty of the human being.  In haunted
places this voice carries the light of beauty like a magical
lantern to transform the desolation, to remind us that
regardless of what may be wrenched from us, there is a
dignity and hope that we do not have to lose.  This voice
brings us directly into contact with the inalienable presence
of beauty in the soul.

John O'Donohue

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Photo from the Internet