Anam Cara

GATEWAYS TO WONDER

One of the fascinating things about humans is that, in contrast to stones and to water and to earth and to fields, they seem to be privileged and burdened with the ability to think. That’s the beautiful intimacy of the human in the world. There is nothing as intimate as a human being. Every human person is inevitably involved with two worlds: the world they carry within them and the world that is out there. All thinking, all writing, all action, all creation and all destruction is about that bridge between the two worlds. All thought is about putting a face on experience. Socrates said that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Socrates started raising the questions. One of the most exciting and energetic forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a thought that you are either blind to or that are not available to you. So a question is really one of the forms in which wonder expresses itself. One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways of wonder. Martin Heidegger said that when you can conceive of a frontier you are already beyond it, because a frontier—while it may be the limitation of where you now are or what you now feel or think—is also the threshold of what you are actually going to move into. This is put very lyrically and beautifully by a great rustic poet, our own Patrick Kavanagh, who said in his amazing “Advent” poem, “Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.” That means that in a certain sense, the narrower and more confined the chink or the crevice or the opening, the greater the possibility of wonder actually is. All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking. Thought is at the heart of reality. All of the things that we do, the things that we see, touch, feel, are all constructions of thought. When you think about a city, everything in that city is an expression of thought. Hands and machines created the things, but thought was actually the forerunner of all that. And thought, if it’s not open to wonder, can be limiting, destructive and very, very dangerous. If you look at thought as a circle, and if half the arc of the circle is the infusion of wonder, then the thought will be kind, it will be gracious, and it will also be compassionate, because wonder and compassion are sisters. Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us. Now, other people can glimpse it from the way we behave, the way our language is and particularly the way that our face and our eyes are. But no one but you knows what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it. That’s the whole mystery of writing and language and expression—that when you do say it, what others hear and what you intend and know are often totally different kinds of things. So each one of us is privileged to be the custodian of this inner world, which is accessible only through thought, and we are also doomed, in the sense that we cannot unshackle ourselves from the world that we actually carry. Therefore, I think that all human being and human identity and human growth is about finding some kind of balance between the privilege and the doom or the inevitability of carrying this kind of world.

THE ANIMAL WORLD

I think one of the terribly destructive areas of Western thought is that we have excluded animals from the soul, the awareness and the thought world. I feel that animals are maybe more refined than us, and that part of the recognition and respect for the animal is to acknowledge that they inhabit a different universe from us. There are sheep and rabbits and cows in the village I live in, in Connemara, and none of them know anything about Jesus, about the Buddha, about Wall Street, about zero tolerance. They are just in another world altogether. Part of the wonder of the human mind is when you look towards animals with respect and reverence, you begin to feel the otherness of the world that they actually carry. It must take immense contemplative discipline to be able to hold a world stirring within you and to have no means to express it, because animals in the main are silent and they don’t have access to the paradoxical symbolic nuance of language as we have. So I use the word “contemplative” about them in that sense. For me, they are a source of a great kind of wonder. Now, that doesn’t mean that I romanticize them—I was born on a farm and I know farming very well and I know the other dark side of the animal world too—but there is something really to be wondered at, at the way that they move and the way that they are. Where I envy animals is that I don’t think they are haunted by consciousness in the way that humans are. I think that one of the most beautiful and frightening days in the life of a human person is when their mind really wakes up. Often when you watch a new baby or a little child, you see that they’re still within the pastures of wonder and innocence. Then you think of them coming out of that, and traveling the longest journey that all of us have made—the journey of innocence to experience through adolescence. But that isn’t really the worst journey. The worst and most frightening moment is the day that your mind really wakes up and that you suddenly know that everything that you think, everything that you feel, everything that you know and everything that you are connected with is somehow dependent on your awareness and your consciousness. You know that if you are graced with creative and compassionate and warm awareness, you are going to have an incredible life. You are going to have sufferings as well, but you will always return to that place of warmth and fire within yourself. But you know too on that day that if your awareness goes away or if it gets into the totally chaotic, symbolic world of otherness that we call madness, that you are totally gone. I often think of people in mental institutions. They are living in a jungle of symbols for which there is no map or grammar, and they are people who are totally instantaneous and totally haunted by a negative, distraught kind of wonder. There are many dimensions of human life that journalism, the media, religion and politics never advert to, marginal places where incredible soul-presence and soul-making and soul-creativity are always secretly at work. Ezra Pound said something like that when he said that beauty always shuns the public places—where the light is too garish and where there is no shelter—but it goes to the out-of-the-way, unknown places because only there will it encounter the reverence and hospitality of gaze that is worthy of it. Or again, to paraphrase Kavanagh: “the chink is too wide.”

TRANSIENCE

One of the most amazing recognitions of the human mind is that time passes. Everything that we experience somehow passes into a past invisible place: when you think of yesterday and the things that were troubling you and worrying you, and the intentions that you had and the people that you met, and you know you experienced them all, but when you look for them now, they are nowhere—they have vanished. One of the questions that has always puzzled me is, is there a place where our vanished days secretly gather? To put it another way, like the medieval mystics used to ask, where does the light go when the candle is blown out? It seems to me that our times are very concerned with experience, and that nowadays to hold a belief, to have a value must be woven through the loom of one’s own experience, and that experience is the touchstone of integrity, verification and authenticity. And yet the destiny of every experience is that it will disappear. It’s a great consolation of course that things do actually disappear, especially when you feel bad. There was a contest of wisdom one time in ancient Greece to find who could write down a sentence which would somehow always be true. The sentence that won the competition was “This too will pass.” One of my favorite thinkers in the feminine and mystical tradition is Teresa of Avila. She cautioned that in bad, lonesome, difficult times, you should never forget that this too will actually pass. So there is a shelter and a kindness in that acknowledgment of transience. But there’s also a desperate loneliness in transience, in knowing the one that you love, the beautiful time that you are having, the lovely things that are happening to you will all actually disappear.

MEMORY

So is there a place where our vanished days secretly gather? I think there is, and I believe the name of that place is memory. Memory to me is one of the great sources, one of the great treasure houses, of wonder. You look at humans walking around on streets, in houses, in churches, out in fields, and you realize that each one of these creatures is carrying within herself or himself a whole harvest of lived experience. You can actually go back within yourself to great things that have happened to you and enjoy them and allow them to shelter and bless you again. One of the negative aspects of contemporary life is that there is such disrespect for memory. Memory is now attributed to computers, but computers do not have memory—they have hijacked the notion. Memory now seems to be focused almost exclusively on past woundedness and hurt, some of it induced, some of it real. It’s sad that people don’t use their good memories and revisit again and again the harvest of memory that is within them, and live out of the riches of that harvest, rather than out of the poverty of their woundedness. Hegel, a philosopher I love, said, “The wounds of the spirit heal and they leave no scars.” If we can somehow bring the difficult things with us into the realm and the light of our souls, it is unbelievable the healing that will achieve itself in us. 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 in 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 the wildness that is in our own hearts. We should never forget that death is waiting for us. A man in Connemara said one time to a friend of mine, Beidh muid sínte siar, a dúirt sé, cúig mhilliúin bliain déag faoin chré—we’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years, and we have a short exposure. I feel that when you recognize that death is on its way, it is a great liberation, because it means that you can in some way feel the call to live everything that is within you. One of the greatest sins is the unlived life, not to allow yourself to become chief executive of the project you call your life, to have a reverence always for the immensity that is inside of you. Nietzsche saw with devastating clarity the collusion that society actually is. He stripped back the layers of lies, pretension and gamesmanship, and he got down to the wild flow of energy in the well of the soul. It is impossible as a humanoid to stop the well of energy and the well of light and the well of life that is inside you. You might calm it and quell it, but it will still rise up within you.

FRIENDSHIP

Friendship in particular should be a wonderful kind of togetherness where each of the friends encourages and liberates each other into the fullness of their own potential. Friends very often become habitual with each other and they limit the potential of their friendship. If you feel with your friend that you are called to the outer frontiers, then the friendship is in growth, and it also has a bit of danger in it, and a risk; and without risk in the world of the soul, nothing really grows. It’s lovely when you meet people that were maybe very set in their days and in their ways, and maybe because of illness, or because of friendship or love, or some kind of awakening, suddenly the scene changes and they acknowledge, as Antonio Machado, the Spanish poet, says, that they are now in a different world. That sense of difference and otherness is always what makes us wonder. When I see predictability and habit and similarity, I am always wondering what is hidden underneath. Or when I see really good people, or really good families, I ask myself, where is the dark stuff hidden here? What is buried under the gleaming surface? Because every image is partial, and most images have a great falsity in them. When you get below the image level to the river of otherness and difference that is in every soul, that is when your eyes fill with wonder. You realize that maybe just for a little second, you are getting a glimpse of another world that is somehow there behind what you thought you knew. The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez was asked by his friend and fellow writer Mendoza, in a wonderful collection of conversations, what did he think of his wife, Mercedes? Márquez, who has been with Mercedes for forty years now, said to Mendoza, “I know her so well now, that I haven’t the slightest idea who she is.” I think that is familiarity as an invitation to absolute wonder.

FEAR

Fear is a force that can turn that which is real, meaningful, warm, gentle and kind in your life into devastation and desert. It is a powerful force. Fear derives its power also from time and from the fragility of the human heart. Because there is both time and distance between us and everything else inside us, very often the way we are towards these things becomes fearful because we get insecure. To link in with the theme of this conversation, I feel that fear is negative wonder. It is the point at which wonder begins to consume itself and scrape off the essence of things. It begins to people realities with ghost figures. It makes the self feel vulnerable and it can take away all the loveliness from your experience and from your friendships, and even from your action and your work. The reason fear has so much power is that fear is the sister of death, and that death works through fear an awful lot. I don’t believe that death comes at the end of life. I believe your death was there at your birth with you. It was the unknown presence. Every step of the road of your life that you take, your death is beside you. Death often works through the vehicle of fear, so as you begin to transfigure your own fear, you are actually transfiguring the presence of your own death. At the end of your life, when death comes, it won’t be some kind of monster forcefully expelling you from the familiar into the unknown, but it can actually be a friend who hides the most truthful image of your own soul. Each day, however, you have to work at transfiguring the fear.

The best story I know about fear is a story from India. It is several thousand years old, and it is a story about a man who was condemned to spend a night in a cell with a poisonous snake. If he made the slightest little stir, the snake was on top of him and he was dead. So he stood in the corner of the cell, opposite where the snake was, and he was petrified. He barely dared to breathe for fear of alerting the snake, and he stood stiff and petrified all night long. As the first bars of light began to come into the cell at dawn, he began to make out the shape of the snake, and he was saying to himself, wasn’t I lucky that I never stirred. But when the full force of light came in with the full dawn, he noticed that it wasn’t a snake at all. It was an old rope. Now the story is banal, but the moral of the story is very profound: in a lot of the rooms of our minds, there are harmless old ropes thrown in corners, but when our fear begins to work on them, we convert them into monsters who hold us prisoners in the bleakest, most impoverished rooms of our hearts. Outside these rooms there are glories waiting for us, but we remain transfixed in the panic of fear’s awful falsity.

LIGHT

What is the source of the light that banishes our fear? I read a lovely sentence in a Hindu book years ago which said, consciousness always shines with the light from beyond itself. One of my images of the divine is that it is light in some form, and that the divine light works very tenderly with human freedom. If you don’t believe that the light is there, you will experience the darkness. But if you believe the light is there, and if you call the light towards you, and if you call it into whatever you’re involved in, the light will never fail you. I often think that what the heart of the Christian mystery, the Resurrection, means is that at the heart of darkness—to use Joseph Conrad’s phrase—there isn’t darkness but the eternal candle. In Connemara, the seandaoine used to say when somebody died, Tá a choinneal múchta, his candle is quenched. I asked an old man one day why he would say that, and he said, I often heard as a small lad that when you’re born, there’s a candle lit for you in the eternal world, and the length of your life is the length of the candle! Thought, creative thought particularly, is about quarrying for or liberating light. There is light inside in everything that happens to you.

One of the really sad things is when people get involved in situations in their relationships where it becomes totally destructive, and where they fix on each other on the mutual points of gravity and poverty. It is so hard for them to believe that hidden in the heart of this poverty, there is light. Much of our impoverishment derives precisely and directly from a failure of imagination, because there is some very tenuous and very special linkage between expectation and gift. If you do expect something with reverence and compassion, it will come towards you and be given to you. The proof of that is, people who have been through hell on this earth, and it still somehow hasn’t tarnished or dulled their essence. Within the awfulness that was happening to them, they were somehow given the grace to find the buried light and it minded them. As it is said in the Bible, “Not a hair on your head will be harmed.” I think of that lovely phrase “Do not be afraid”; it is repeated 366 times in the Bible. That is once for every day and, as somebody said, once for no reason at all!

SHELTER

There is a special shelter around every person. One of the things that all children should be taught when they are growing up is that there is a shelter around them, but that they won’t feel the shelter if they don’t expect it and if they don’t know that it is there. That shelter is the shelter of your soul, it is the shelter of your God and it is the shelter of your angel. I know that angels are back in fashion now, and a lot of the thinking about angels is very soft thinking. I feel that there is given to each of us an angel’s spirit to shelter and protect us and mind us. If you don’t think that spirit is beside you, then you may never feel its presence, but if you do begin to tune into it and become aware of it, you will be astounded at the gentleness, the encouragement and the inspiration that your angel will bring you. There is some beautiful work done by an American psychologist called David Miller on the whole idea of angels and inspiration. One of the great places of wonder is inspiration. The lovely thing about the concept of wonder is that it completely escapes the grid of control and predictability. It seems to witness to another sense of sourcing which cannot be programmed, which can be expected and which is always received with surprise. One of the lovely things about Anglo-Saxon linguistic philosophy is that it has made us aware of the fact that we shouldn’t approach the essence of a thing by trying to get a hard definition of it. We should try more to gather the family of concepts or ideas which belong to a reality. If you look at the concept of wonder, you have presences like surprise, expectation, celebration, inspiration, unpredictability, participation, mystery. There is a wonderful German philosopher called Hans-Georg Gadamer who said in his book Truth and Method that a horizon is something towards which we move but it is also something that moves along with us. One nice metaphor of human growth would be that you could be always moving to a new horizon, not abandoning the former ones, but in the graciousness of memory’s loyalty actually bringing them along with you so that you are coming to new places all the time. One of the lovely things about wonder is that it is also the sister of novelty and newness and freshness.

IMAGINATION

Imagination is one of the closest presences in the whole family of wonder. In a way, imagination is a quality of all these different presences, and imagination is the threshold at which they begin to emerge. Imagination never pretends to know it all. It never demands or claims an absolute standpoint, but it always relishes and celebrates the fact it is on the threshold where it cannot see everything. The kind of knowing that is in imagination is knowing through exploration. It is not predetermined concepts or ideas. I think that every person, particularly the child, has incredible imagination. When you think of the way that each of us came into the world, we were actually for the first several years of our lives absolute practitioners—every little girl and little boy was a priestess and priest of the imagination. They completely participated in the world through the power of imagination. Imagination is also very, very compassionate. It will never take one side of a polarity or a contradiction, but it will try to weave both together and to embrace them. When you look at the fact that a human always inhabits a threshold, then you see the power of imagination. Each person is always on the threshold between their inner world and their outer world, between light and darkness, between known and unknown, between question and quest, between fact and possibility. This threshold runs through every experience that we have, and our only real guide to this world is the imagination. One of the lovely things a person can do for another person is to awaken the power and sacrament of their imagination, because when you awaken someone’s imagination, you are giving them a new kingdom, a new world. William Blake said that Christ is the imagination, which I think is one of the most beautiful theological statements I have ever heard. If you look at the place of Christ, the Son of God, and the whole story of the creation, he was the first “other” that ever was, and I believe, therefore, the prism of all difference that is. Imagination in the Blakeian sense is about the awakening to and the recognition of the sacredness of all the difference that is. Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Possibilities are always more interesting than facts. We shouldn’t frown on facts, but our world is congested with them. Facts are retarded possibilities, they are possibilities that have already been actualized. But for every fact that becomes a fact, there are seven, eight, maybe five hundred possibilities hanging around in the background that didn’t make it into the place where they could be elected and realized as the actual fact. It is very interesting to look at what you consider real and to think that it is always peopled by a background presence of unrealized possibilities. That is one of the fascinating things in going through the world—you wonder at destiny, at the way that your life actually flows and moves and grows. I have a great suspicion of an awful lot of what is paraded as moral decision and moral rectitude and moral recognition. I think there is a beautiful morality of possibility to be written, because placing all the emphasis on moral choice is very limiting. Choice is always about loss: you choose one thing over the other several things. And maybe the soul doesn’t want to do that. It is a very interesting question: whether in the course of your life, you had to choose one direction, if in actual fact, unknown to you in the invisible area of your life, in the unknown area of your life, your other unchosen lives might not actually travel with you as well. Maybe one of the great surprises we will get in the wonder moment of after-death is that when we wake up and straighten up in that new kingdom, we will find that all our unchosen and unlived lives are there to welcome us as well.

LANDSCAPE

Humans have tamed landscape. They have floors, which make the ground level. There are roads and streets which make it easy to walk on. In a way, when humans are in the land, they are always on their way to somewhere else, whereas the ultimate faithfulness in life is the faithfulness of landscape. Landscape is always there. It has a Zen-like stillness to it, and when you come back after ten years or forty years, you’ll always find it in the same place. That is captured in the old Irish seanfhocal, which says, Castar na daoine ar a chéile, ach ní chastar na sléibhte ar a chéile—people meet, but the mountains never actually meet.

I love mountains. I feel that mountains are huge contemplatives. They are there and they are in the presence up to their necks and they are still in it and with it and within it. One of the lovely ways to pray is to take your body out into the landscape and to be still in it. Your body is made out of clay, so your body is actually a miniature landscape that has got up from under the earth and is now walking on the normal landscape. If you go out for several hours into a place that is wild, your mind begins to slow down, down, down. What is happening is that the clay of your body is retrieving its own sense of sisterhood with the great clay of the landscape. Water in a landscape is a fascinating thing as well. I often think that water is the tears of the earth’s joy and sadness. Every kind of water in a landscape has a different kind of tonality and a different kind of presence to it. You think of the stillness of a well, of the energy of a stream, of the totality of the ocean or the singularity and memory of a river. I also think that trees are incredible presences. There is incredible symmetry in a tree, between its inner life and its outer life, between its rooted memory and its external active presence. A tree grows up and grows down at once and produces enough branches to incarnate its wild divinity. It doesn’t limit itself—it reaches for the sky and it reaches for the source, all in one seamless kind of movement. So I think landscape is an incredible, mystical teacher, and when you begin to tune into its sacred presence, something shifts inside you. One of the lovely developments in consciousness as we come towards the end of the millennium is this dawning recognition that we are guests of the universe, and that landscape was the firstborn of creation and was here hundreds of millions of years before us. It knows what is actually going on. To put it in a theological way, I feel that landscape is always at prayer, and its prayer is seamless. It is always enfolded in the presence. It is a high work of imagination, because there is no repetition in a landscape. Every stone, every tree, every field is a different place. When your eye begins to become attentive to this panorama of differentiation, then you realize what a privilege it is to actually be here.

For a New Beginning

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,

Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,

Noticing how you willed yourself on,

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety

And the gray promises that sameness whispered,

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,

Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And out you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream,

A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

From To Bless the Space Between Us