Anam Cara

TRADITIONALLY, A JOURNEY WAS A RHYTHM OF THREE FORCES: time, self and space. Now the digital virus has truncated time and space. Marooned on each instant, we have forfeited the practice of patience, the attention to emergence and delight in the Eros of discovery. The self has become anxious for what the next instant might bring. This greed for destination obliterates the journey. The digital desire for the single instant schools the mind in false priority. Each instant proclaims its own authority and the present image demands the complete attention of the eye. There is no sense of natural sequence where an image is allowed to emerge from its background and context when the time is right, the eye is worthy and the heart is appropriate. The mechanics of electronic imaging reverses the incarnation of real encounter. But a great journey needs plenty of time. It should not be rushed; if it is, your life becomes a kind of abstract package tour devoid of beauty and meaning. There is such a constant whirr of movement that you never know where you are. You have no time to give yourself to the present experience. When you accumulate experiences at such a tempo, everything becomes thin. Consequently, you become ever more absent from your life and this fosters emptiness that haunts the heart.

When you regain a sense of your life as a journey of discovery, you return to rhythm with yourself. When you take the time to travel with reverence, a richer life unfolds before you. Moments of beauty begin to braid your days. When your mind becomes more acquainted with reverence, the light, grace and elegance of beauty find you more frequently. When the destination becomes gracious, the journey becomes an adventure of beauty. The wonder of the journey as a voyage of reverence and discovery finds lyrical expression in C.P. Cavafy’s poem ‘Ithaca’. He imagines the reader setting out on this journey to Ithaca, a journey rich with promise for senses and soul, rich with glad and difficult learning. The poem concludes with a wonderful evocation of the destination as midwife to the soul:

Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not fooled you.

Having become so wise, with so much experience,

You will have understood, by then, what these Ithacas mean.

The poem advises great patience and never to hurry. Take your time and be everywhere you are.

N

OSTALGIA FOR THE

E

TERNAL

AT ITS HEART, THE JOURNEY OF EACH LIFE IS A PILGRIMAGE through unforeseen sacred places that enlarge and enrich the soul. On the way time often unveils its eternal interior. In the third century Plotinus wrote his Enneads. The Enneads is a wonderful cathedral of thought, a Chartres of late antiquity. The thinking of Plotinus is luminous with passion and nostalgia for the eternal:

This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this is the Soul’s feel for it, every Soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love – just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers. These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.

This is a magnificent evocation of what beauty is and does. Beauty induces atmosphere and spirit: wonder, delicious turbulence, love, longing and a trembling delight. Plotinus suggests that beauty embraces both visible and invisible worlds. We encounter and engage this beauty through the ‘feel’ of the soul. He defines lovers as those who feel this deeper wound of invisible beauty; he also suggests that these are secret, unknown lovers. The true sense of beauty belongs to the inner mystery of identity. Love of the beautiful is a secret and sacred passion.

Plotinus was keenly aware of the beauties of the natural world. However, these beauties had their source in the eternal world from which they were fugitives: they are ‘the beauties of the realm of sense, images and shadow pictures, Fugitives that have entered into Matter – To adore, and to ravish where they are seen . . .’ The world is a mixed, in-between place peopled by images and shadow-pictures. Eternal beauty cannot glow here in its full force or purity; nevertheless it is present as a fugitive and awakens our adoration when it is glimpsed.