Anam Cara

Presence Is Soul-Atmosphere

Presence is the whole atmosphere of a person or thing. Presence is more than the way a person walks, looks, or speaks. It is more than the shape of a tree or the colour of a stone, yet it is a blend of all these aspects. Presence is mainly the atmosphere of spirit that is behind them all and comes through them. This is why no two presences are ever the same. There are landscapes that are deeply still and consoling. Travel a half a mile farther, and you could be in a place that is so brooding and sinister you cannot wait to escape. You can often sense this in people’s homes too. Houses now seem to resemble each other more and more. Years ago, as a child, one sensed how different each home was. Each one had a unique aura. When a person came to visit, they seemed to bring in the presence of their home with them. To a child’s mind, each neighbour’s house was a different cave of presence. The furniture, colours, and décor of each interior were different. In one, you can make yourself at home. In another, a brooding tension or hostility makes you want to leave immediately.

There is a really distinctive and somewhat vulnerable presence to a home in which someone lives alone. A family tends to fill up a house. The sounds of their conversations layer the walls and rooms with the texture of presence. When you come in, you walk into a vibrant web of presence. There are practically no clear spaces in a family home; every corner is packed with echo. In contrast, the home of the solitary person is never completely full. There is clearance and silence here. The silence here belongs around one presence. Regardless of how cosy and welcoming the home may be, there is always a distilled quality of longing in a solitary person’s home. Though the person is solitary, the home can often be full of presence and not lonely at all. Yet it is usually a more intimate event to visit such a home. There is none of the distraction and avoidance that meets you in a family home which somehow protects both you and them from exposure. In the solitary home you have a certain access everywhere to the solitude of the inhabitant.

Presence has a depth that lives behind the form or below the surface. There is a well of presence within every thing, but it is usually hidden from the human eye. This comes in different ripples to the surface. No two stages of presence are ever exactly the same. The flow of soul within means the surface is always different. When you know a place well, you can sense this. The fluent nuance of the light alters the presence of the landscape constantly. As the stream of feeling and thinking flows through you, it also alters your presence. Your presence is always in a subtle flow. When you are happy and at peace, your presence is gentle and approachable. When you are worried or anxious, there is a tension in your presence, and it closes and tightens. If we were able to read presence, we could sense what is happening inside a person’s mind. Some people have an open presence. They cannot hide anything; you know immediately what is haunting or delighting them. Others are adept actors at putting on a face—to, as T. S. Eliot says, “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” The mask is always in place, and it is exceptionally difficult to read what is happening within.

Presence is something you sense and know, but cannot grasp. It engages us, but we can never capture its core; it remains somehow elusive. All the great art forms strive to create living icons of presence. Poets try to cut the line of a poem so that it lives and dances as itself. Poems are some of the most amazing presences in the world. I am always amazed that poems are willing to lie down and sleep inside the flat, closed pages of books. If poems behaved according to their essence, they would be out dancing on the seashore or flying to the heavens or trying to rinse out secrets of the mountains. Reading brings the presence of other times, characters, and cultures into your mind. Reading is an intimate event. When you read a great poem, it reaches deep into regions of your life and memory and reverberates back to the forgotten or invisible regions of your experience. In a great poem, you find lost or silent territories of feeling or thought which were out of your reach. A poem can travel far into your depths to retrieve your neglected longing.