Anam Cara

What longs to flame toward death.

When the calm enfolds the love-nights

That created you, where you have created

A feeling from the Unkown steals over you

While the tranquil candle burns.

You remain no longer caught

In the peneumbral gloom

You are stirred and new, you desire

To soar to higher creativity.

No distance makes you ambivalent.

You come on wings, enchanted

In such hunger for light, you

Become the butterfly burnt to nothing.

So long as you have not lived this:

To die is to become new,

You remain a gloomy guest

On the dark earth.

(TRANS. BY THE AUTHOR)

This poem captures the wonderful spiritual force at the heart of longing. It suggests that true vitality is hidden within longing. When you give in to creative passion, it will bring you to the ultimate thresholds of transfiguration and renewal. This growth causes pain, but it is a sacred pain. It would be much more tragic to have cautiously avoided these depths and remained marooned on the shiny surfaces of the banal.

LOVE AS ANCIENT RECOGNITION

Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition. This metaphor of friendship can be grounded in the clay nature of the human body. When you find the person you love, an act of ancient recognition brings you together. It is as if millions of years before the silence of nature broke, your lover’s clay and your clay lay side by side. Then in the turning of the seasons, your one clay divided and separated. You began to rise as distinct clay forms, each housing a different individuality and destiny. Without even knowing it, your secret memory mourned your loss of each other. While your clay selves wandered for thousands of years through the universe, your longing for each other never faded. This metaphor helps to explain how in the moment of friendship two souls suddenly recognize each other. It could be a meeting on the street, or at a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is the flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing. Love opens the door of ancient recognition. You enter. You come home to each other at last. As Euripides said, “Two friends, one soul.”

In the classical tradition, this is wonderfully expressed in the Symposium, Plato’s magical dialogue on the nature of love. Plato adverts to the myth that humans in the beginning were not single individuals. Each person was two selves in one. Then they became separated; consequently, you spend your life looking for your other half. When you find and discover each other, it is through this act of profound recognition. In friendship, an ancient circle closes. That which is ancient between you will mind you, shelter you, and hold you together. When two people fall in love, each comes in out of the loneliness of exile, home to the one house of belonging. At weddings, it is appropriate to acknowledge the gracious destiny that enabled this couple to recognize each other when they met. Each recognized the other as the one in whom their heart could be at home. Love should never be a burden, for there is more between you than your mutual presence.

THE CIRCLE OF BELONGING

We need more resonant words to mirror this than the tired word relationship. Phrases like “an ancient circle closes” or “an ancient belonging awakens and discovers itself” help to bring out the deeper meaning and mystery of encounter. This is the more sacred language of the soul for togetherness and intimacy. When two people love each other, there is a third force between them. Sometimes when a friendship is in trouble, it is not to be healed by endless analysis or counseling. You need to change the rhythm of seeing each other and come in contact again with the ancient belonging that brought you together. If you invoke its power and presence around you, this ancient affinity will hold you together. Two people who are really awakened inhabit the one circle of belonging. They have awakened a more ancient force around them that will hold them together and mind them.