Anam Cara

“Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.”

A life’s journey is made up of continual daily choices. But there are moments of profound choosing, when a partner, a life-direction, or a new way of being in the world is chosen. This can be a wonderful time of focus and re-direction. When such a moment of choosing is genuine, it is usually preceded by a time of gestation and gathering. Many different strands of your past experience begin to weave together until gradually the new direction announces itself. Its voice is sure with the inevitability of the truth. When your life-decisions emerge in this way from the matrix of your experience, they warrant your trust and commitment. When you can choose in this way, you move gracefully within the deeper rhythm of your soul. The geography of your destiny is always clearer to the eye of your soul than to the intentions and the needs of your surface mind. Wordsworth says in “The Prelude,” “Soul, that art the eternity of thought.” The eye of the soul can see in all directions. When you truly listen to the voice of your soul, you awaken your kinship with the eternal urgency that longs to lead you home. The deepest call to a creative life comes from within your own interiority. It may be awakened or occasioned by a person or situation outside you, yet the surest voice arises from your own secret depth. The surest choosing grows out of the natural soil of experience. The Buddhists say, “When the apple is ripe, it falls of itself from the Tree.”

When we come to moments of profound choosing, we need to be careful about how and where we draw the lines of our choice. Even though a choice sets the fundamental direction of your life, it should not hermetically seal you off from the rest of life. The outer lines of choice should remain porous. Though we always end up having to choose, choice itself remains a mystery, utterly opaque, no matter how much we deliberate. Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” shows how, after the event, we achieve clarity and self-importance in dramatizing choices already made. But the choice we made is, was, and remains mysterious. We are fashioned from the earth, are clay shapes in human form. We are children of Nature, where borders are seldom sealed. Underneath our walls and city streets, left to itself, the earth is still one ever-changing field. In order for life to flow, frontiers must remain porous. Nowhere is this more evident than the outer frontier of the human body, our skin. Skin is porous and in a constant interflow with nature. Were it to seal itself off in some hermetic act, it would kill the body. Similarly, the outer lines of a clear choice or life-path should also remain porous in order to allow our other unchosen lives to continue to bless us.