Anam Cara

by John O'Donohue

  WISDOM AS POISE AND GRACE

  Wisdom is another quality of old age. In former societies, the old people were called elders because it was recognized that having lived so long, they had harvested wisdom. Our culture is absolutely obsessed with information. There is more information now available in the world than ever before. We have so much knowledge about every possible thing. Yet there is great difference between knowledge and wisdom. You can know many things, you can know a lot of facts about things, even facts about yourself, but it is the truths that you realize yourself that move deeply into you. Wisdom, then, is a deeper way of knowing. Wisdom is the art of living in rhythm with your soul, your life, and the divine. Wisdom is the way that you learn to decipher the unknown; and the unknown is our closest companion. So wisdom is the art of being courageous and generous with the unknown, of being able to decipher and recognize its treasures. In Celtic culture, and in the old Irish Celtic world, there was immense respect for wisdom. Since the Celtic world was primarily a matriarchal society, very many of these wise people were women. The Celts had a wonderful tradition of wisdom, which subsequently continued down into Irish monasticism. When Europe was going through the Dark Ages, it was the monks from Ireland who preserved the memory of learning. They set up centers of learning all over Europe. The Irish monks recivilized Europe. That learning became the basis of the wonderful medieval scholasticism and its rich culture.

  Traditionally in Ireland each region had its own wise person. In County Clare, there was a wise woman called Biddy Early. In Galway there was a woman called Cailleach an Clochain or the old woman of Clifden, who also had this wisdom. When people were confused in their lives, or worried about the future, they would often visit these wise figures. Through their counsel, people learned to engage their destiny anew; they learned to live more deeply and enjoy protection from imminent danger and destruction. Wisdom is often associated with the harvesttime of life. That which is scattered has no unity, whereas that which is gathered comes home to unity and belonging. Wisdom, then, is the art of balancing the known with the unknown, the suffering with the joy; it is a way of linking the whole of life together in a new and deeper unity. Our society would be very well advised to attend to the wisdom of old people, to integrate them into the processes of decision making. The wisdom of the aged could be invaluable in helping us to articulate a vision for our future. Ultimately, wisdom and vision are sisters; the creativity, critique, and prophecy of vision issue from the fount of wisdom. Older people are great treasure-houses of wisdom.

  OLD AGE AND THE TWILIGHT TREASURES

  Old age is also the twilight time of life. On the west coast of Ireland the light is really magical. Many artists come to work in this light. Twilight in the west of Ireland is a time of beautiful colors. It is as if the latent colors of the day, which were lost under the whiteness of the light, now have the courage to emerge; every color has a great depth. The day bids us adieu in such a dignified and beautiful way. The day’s farewell is expressed in twilight, in the magic of color and beauty. The twilight makes the night welcome. It is as if the beautiful colors of twilight slip into the night and make the night habitable and bearable, a place where there is hidden light. Similarly, in old age, the twilight time of life, many of the unnoticed treasures in your life can now become available and visible to you. Often it is only with the twilight perception that you can really glimpse the mysteries of your soul. When the neon light of analysis grasps at the soul, the soul rushes to conceal and hide itself. Twilight perception can be a threshold to invite the shy soul to come closer to you in order to glimpse its beautiful lineaments of longing and possibility.

  OLD AGE AND FREEDOM

  Old age can also be a time of clearance. All perception requires clearance. If things are too close to you, you cannot see them. Frequently that is why we value so little the people who are really close to us. We are unable to step back and behold them with the sense of wonder, critique, and appreciation they deserve. Nor do we behold ourselves either, because we are too close to the rush of our lives. In old age, as your life calms, you will be able to make many clearances in order to see who you are, what life has done to you, and what you have made of your life. Old age can be a time of releasing the many false burdens that you have dragged behind you through stony fields of years. Sometimes the greatest burdens humans carry are the burdens they make for themselves. People who put years into constructing a heavy burden for themselves often say, Sure it is my cross in life, God help me, I hope God will reward me for carrying it. This is nonsense. Looking down and seeing a people carrying burdens they have invented and created themselves, God must think, How foolish they are to think that it has anything to do with my destiny for them. It has more to do with their own negative use of the freedom and possibility that I give them. False burdens can fall away in old age. One possible way to begin would be to ask yourself, What are the lonely burdens that you have carried? Some of them would definitely belong to you, but more of them you have just picked up and made for yourself. To begin to let them go is to lighten the pressure and weight on your life. You will then experience a lightness and a great inner freedom. Freedom can be one of the wonderful fruits of old age. You can undo the damage that you did to yourself early on in your life. This whole complex of possibility is summed up magnificently by the wonderful Mexican poet Octavio Paz:

  With great difficulty advancing by millimetres each year, I carve a road out of the rock. For millenniums my teeth have wasted and my nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and the open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work. I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life.

  A Blessing for Old Age

  May the light of your soul mind you,

  May all of your worry and anxiousness about becoming old be transfigured,

  May you be given a wisdom with the eye of your soul,

  to see this beautiful time of harvesting.

  May you have the commitment to harvest your life,

  to heal what has hurt you, to allow it to come closer to you and become one with you.

  May you have great dignity, may you have a sense of how free you are,

  and above all may you be given the wonderful gift of meeting the eternal light

  and beauty that is within you.

  May you be blessed, and may you find a wonderful love in yourself for yourself.

  SIX

  DEATH: THE HORIZON IS IN THE WELL

  THE UNKNOWN COMPANION

  There is a presence who walks the road of life with you. This presence accompanies your every moment. It shadows your every thought and feeling. On your own, or with others, it is always there with you. When you were born, it came out of the womb with you, but with the excitement at your arrival, nobody noticed it. Though this presence surrounds you, you may still be blind to its companionship. The name of this presence is death.

  We are wrong to think that death comes only at the end of life. Your physical death is but the completion of a process on which your secret companion has been working since your birth. Your life is the life of your body and soul, but the presence of your death enfolds both. How does death manifest itself to us in our day-to-day experience? Death meets us in and through different guises in the areas of our life where we are vulnerable, frail, hurting, or negative. One of the faces of death is negativity. In every person there is some wound of negativity; this is like a blister on your life. You can be quite destructive toward yourself, even when times are good. Some people are having wonderful lives right now, but they do not actually realize it. Maybe later on, when things become really difficult or desperate, a person will look back on these times and say, “You know, I was really happy then but sadly I never realized it.”

  THE FACES OF DEATH IN EVERYDAY
LIFE

  There is a gravity within that continually weighs on us and pulls us away from the light. Negativity is an addiction to the bleak shadow that lingers around every human form. Within a poetics of growth or spiritual life, the transfiguration of this negativity is one of our continuing tasks. This negativity is the force and face of your own death gnawing at your belonging in the world. It wants to make you a stranger in your own life. This negativity holds you outside in exile from your own love and warmth. You can transfigure negativity by turning it toward the light of your soul. This soul-light gradually takes the gravity, weight, and hurt out of negativity. Eventually, what you call the negative side of yourself can become the greatest force for renewal, creativity, and growth within you. Each one of us has this task. It is a wise person who knows where their negativity lies and yet does not become addicted to it. There is a greater and more generous presence behind your negativity. In its transfiguration, you move into the light that is hidden in this larger presence. To continually transfigure the faces of your own death ensures that, at the end of your life, your physical death will be no stranger, robbing you against your will of the life that you have had; you will know its face intimately. Since you have overcome your fear, your death will be a meeting with a lifelong friend from the deepest side of your own nature.

  Another face of death, another way it expresses itself in our daily experience, is through fear. There is no soul without the shadow of fear. It is a courageous person who is able to identify his fears and work with them as forces for creativity and growth. There are different levels of fear within each of us. One of the most powerful aspects of fear is its uncanny ability to falsify what is real in your life. There is no force I know that can so quickly destroy the happiness and tranquillity of life.

  There are different levels of fear. Many people are terrified of letting go and use control as a mechanism to order and structure their lives. They like to be in control of what is happening around them and to them. But too much control is destructive. You become trapped in the protective program that you weave around your life. This can put you outside many of the blessings destined for you. Control must always remain partial and temporary. At times of pain, and particularly at the time of your death, you may not be able to maintain this control. Mystics have always recognized that to come deeper into the divine presence within, you need to practice detachment. When you begin to let go, it is amazing how enriched your life becomes. False things, which you have desperately held on to, move away very quickly from you. Then what is real, what you love deeply, and what really belongs to you comes deeper into you. Now no one can ever take them away from you.

  DEATH AS THE ROOT OF FEAR

  Some people are afraid of being themselves. Many people allow their lives to be limited by that fear. They play a continual game, fashioning a careful persona that they think the world will accept or admire. Even when they are in their solitude, they remain afraid of meeting themselves. One of the most sacred duties of one’s destiny is the duty to be yourself. When you come to accept yourself and like yourself, you learn not to be afraid of your own nature. At that moment, you come into rhythm with your soul, and then you are on your own ground. You are sure and poised. You are balanced. It is so futile to weary your life with the politics of fashioning a persona in order to meet the expectations of other people. Life is very short, and we have a special destiny waiting to unfold for us. Sometimes through our fear of being ourselves, we sidestep that destiny and end up hungry and impoverished in a famine of our own making.

  The best story I know about the presence of fear is an old story from India about a man condemned to spend the night in a cell with a poisonous snake. If he made the slightest movement, the snake would kill him. All night the man stood petrified in the corner of the cell, afraid even to breathe for fear of alerting the snake. As the first light of dawn reached into the cell, he could make out the shape of the snake in the other corner. He was deeply relieved not to have alerted it. Then as the light of dawn increased further and became really bright, he saw that it was not a snake but an old rope lying in the corner of the cell. The moral of the story suggests that there are harmless things, like that old rope, lying around in many of the rooms of our minds. Our anxiousness then works on them until we convert them into monsters that hold us imprisoned and petrified in small rooms in our lives.

  One of the ways of transfiguring the power and presence of your death is to transfigure your fear. I find it very helpful when I am anxious or afraid to ask myself of what am I really afraid. This is a liberating question. Fear is like fog; it spreads everywhere and falsifies the shape of everything. When you pin it down to that one question, it shrinks back to a proportion that you are able to engage. When you know what is frightening you, you take back the power you had invested in fear. This also separates your fear from the night of the unknown, out of which every fear lives. Fear multiplies in anonymity; it shuns having a name. When you can name your fear, your fear begins to shrink.

  All fear is rooted in the fear of death. There is a time or phase in every life when you are really terrified of dying. We live in time, and time is notoriously contingent. No one can say with certainty what is going to happen to us tonight, tomorrow, or next week. Time can bring anything to the door of your life. One of the terrifying aspects of life is this unpredictability. Anything can happen to you. Now as you are reading this, there are people all over the world who are being savagely visited by the unexpected. Things are, now, happening to them that will utterly disturb their lives forever. Their nest of belonging is broken, their lives will never be the same again. Someone in a doctor’s office is receiving bad news; someone in a road accident will never walk again; someone’s lover is leaving, never to return. When we look into the future of our lives, we cannot predict what will happen. We can be sure of nothing. Yet there is one fact that is certain, namely, that a time will come, a morning, an evening, or a night, when you will be called to make the journey out of this world, when you will have to die. Though that fact is certain, the nature of the fact remains completely contingent. In other words, you do not know where you will die, how you will die, when you will die, or who will be there or how you will feel. These facts about the nature of your death, the most decisive event in your life, remain completely opaque.

  Though death is the most powerful and ultimate experience in one’s life, our culture goes to great pains to deny its presence. In a certain sense, the whole world of media, image, and advertising is trying to cultivate a cult of immortality; consequently, the rhythm of death in life is rarely acknowledged.

  As Emmanuel Levinas so poignantly states it,

  My death comes from an instant upon which I can in no way exercise my power. I do not run up against an obstacle which at last I touch in that collision, which, in surmounting or enduring it, I integrate into my life, suspending its otherness. Death is a menace that approaches me as mystery, its secrecy determines it, or it approaches without being able to be assumed, such that the time that separates me from my death dwindles and dwindles without end, involves a sort of last interval which my consciousness cannot traverse, and where a leap will somehow be produced from death to me. The last part of the route will be crossed without me; the time of death flows upstream….

  DEATH IN THE CELTIC TRADITION

  The Celtic tradition had a refined sense of the miracle of death. There are some beautiful prayers about death in Celtic spirituality. For the Celts, the eternal world was so close to the natural world that death was not seen as a terribly destructive or threatening event. When you enter the eternal world, you are going home to where no shadow, pain, or darkness can ever touch you again. There is a lovely Celtic prayer on this theme:

  I am going home with thee, to thy home, to thy home,

  I am going home with thee, to thy home of winter.

  I am going home with thee, to thy home, to thy home,

  I am going home with thee, to thy home of autumn of spring
and of summer.

  I am going home with thee, thy child of my love to thy eternal bed to thy perpetual sleep.

  (TRANS. A. CARMICHAEL)

  In that prayer the whole world of nature and the seasons is linked up beautifully with the presence of the eternal life.

  You will never understand death or appreciate its loneliness until it visits. In Connemara the people say, “Ni thuigfidh tú an bás go dtiocfaidh sé ag do dhorás féin”—that is, “You will never understand death until it comes to your own door.” Another phrase they have is, “Is fear direach é an bás, ní chuire-ann sé scéal ar bith roimhe”—that is, “Death is a very direct individual who sends no story before him.” Another phrase is “Ní féidir dul i bhfolach ar an mbás”—that is, “There is no place to hide from death.” This means that when death is searching for you, it will always know where to find you.