Anam Cara

The human heart longs to dwell. The root of the word “dwelling” includes the notion of lingering or delaying. It holds the recognition of our pilgrim nature, namely, the suggestion that it will only be possible to linger for a while. From ancient times, we have carved out dwelling places on the earth. Against the raw spread of Nature, the dwelling always takes on a particular intensity. It is a nest of warmth and intimacy. Over years and generations, a large aura of soul seeps into a dwelling and converts it in some way into a temple of presence. We leave our presence on whatever we touch and wherever we dwell. This presence can never be subsequently revoked or wiped away; the aura endures. Presence leaves an imprint on the ether of a place. I imagine that the death of every animal and person creates an invisible ruin in the world. As the world gets older, it becomes ever more full with the ruins of vanished presence. This can be sensed years and years later even more tangibly in the ruins of a place. The ruin still holds the memory of the people who once inhabited it. When the ruin is on a street, its silence is serrated because it endures the import of surrounding echoes. But when a ruin is an isolated presence in a field, it can insist on its personal signature of presence in contrast to the surrounding nature. A ruin is never simply empty. It remains a vivid temple of absence. All other inhabited dwellings hold their memory and their presence is continually added to and deepened by the succeeding generations. It is, consequently, quite poignant that a long since vacated ruin still retains echoes of the presence of the vanished ones. The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin captures this unstated yet perennial presence of the echo of touch in abandoned places:

When night is like day

And over slow footpaths,

Dense with golden dreams,

Lulling breezes drift.

The abandoned place is dense with the presence of the absent ones who have walked there. Another region of absence is the absence of what is yet to come.

The Absence of the Future

There is also a whole region of the absent which embraces not the vanished, but that which has not yet arrived. On the pathway of time, the individual is always somehow in the middle. There are events, persons, thoughts, and novelties ahead that have not yet arrived. This is the territory of the unknown. We are always reaching forward with open gestures into the future. Much of our thinking endeavours to invite the unknown to disclose itself. This is especially true of questions. The question is the place where the unknown becomes articulate and active in us. The question is impatient with the unrevealed. It reaches forward to open doors in the unknown. The question attempts to persuade absence to yield its concealed presences. All perception works at this threshold. Unknown to ourselves we are always unveiling new worlds that lie barely out of reach. This is where the imagination is fully creative. All language, thought, creativity, prayer, and action live out of that fissure between word and thing, longing and fulfilment, subject and object.

There are invisible furrows of absence everywhere.

Towards a Philosophy of Loss

Life is rich and generous in her gifts to us. We receive much more than we know. Frequently life also takes from us. Loss is always affecting us.

A current of loss flows through your life like the tide that returns eternally to rinse away another wafer of stone from the shoreline.

You know the sore edges in your heart where loss has taken from you. You stand now on the stepping stone of the present moment. In a minute it will be gone, never to return. With each breath you are losing time. Absence is the longing for something that is gone. Loss is the hole that it leaves. The sense of loss confers a great poignancy on your longing. Each life has its own different catalogue. Some people are called to endure wounds of loss that are devastating. How they survive is difficult to understand. Each of us in our own way will be called at different times to make its sore acquaintance. From this angle, life is a growth in the art of loss. Eventually, we learn to enter absolute loss at death. In Conamara, when someone is dying, they often say “Tá sí ar a cailleadh,” i.e., She is dying—literally, “She is in her losing.”