Anam Cara

The Longing of the Earth

There is an ancient faithfulness in Nature. Mountains, fields, and shorelines are still to be found in the same places after thousands of years. Landscape is alive in such a dignified and reserved way. It can keep its memories and dreams to itself. Landscape lives the contemplative life of silence, solitude, and stillness. It carries and holds its depths of darkness and lonesomeness with such perfect equanimity. It never falls out of its native rhythm. Rains come with intensity and surprise. Winds rise and keen like lost children, and grow still. Seasons build and emerge with such sure completion, and give way. Yet Nature never loses its sense of sequence. Tides clear the shore and seem to push the sea out, then turn and with great excitement adorn the shore with blue again. Dawn and dusk frame our time here in sure circles. Landscape is at once self-sufficient and hospitable; we are not always worthy guests.

Though its belonging is still and sure, there is also a sense in which Nature is trapped in the one place. This must intensify the longing at the heart of Nature. A little bird alights and fidgets for a minute on a massive rock that was left behind in the corner of this field by the ice thousands of years ago. The miracle of flight is utter freedom for the bird; it can follow its longing anywhere. The stillness of the stone is pure, but it also means that it can never move one inch from its thousand-year stand. It enjoys absolute belonging, but if it longs to move, it can only dream of the return of the ice. Perhaps the stone’s sense of time has the patience of eternity. There is a pathos of stillness in Nature. Yet all of us, its children, are relentlessly moved by longing; we can never enter the innocence of its belonging. Where can we behold Nature’s longing? All we see of Nature is surface. The beauty she sends to the surface could only come from the creativity of great and noble longing. The arrival of spring is a miracle of the richest colour. Yet we always seem to forget that all of these beautiful colours have been born in darkness. The dark earth is the well out of which colour flows. Think of the patience of trees: year after year stretching up to the light, keeping a life-line open between the dark night of the clay and the blue shimmer of the heavens. Think of the beautiful, high contours of mountains lifting up the earth, the music of streams, and the fluent travel of rivers linking the stolid silence of land masses with the choruses of the ocean. Think of animals who carry in their dignity and simplicity of presence such refined longing. Think of your self and feel how you belong so deeply to the earth and how you are a tower of longing in which Nature rises up and comes to voice. We are the children of the clay, who have been released so that the earth may dance in the light.

The great Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty was born in Gort nag Capall in Inis Mor in Aran. He left there as a young man and had never returned. Shortly before he died, he returned to that little village. A lifetime of changes had occurred, most of those he once knew were now dead. On his way into the village, he saw the big rock which had been there for thousands of years. O’Flaherty hit the old stone with his walking stick and said, “A Chloich mhóir athním tusa,” i.e., O great stone I recognize you. In silence and stillness, the stone held the memory of the village. Stone is the tabernacle of memory. Until we allow some of Nature’s stillness to reclaim us, we will remain victims of the instant and never enter the heritage of our ancient belonging.