Anam Cara

Perhaps because they are so much themselves, wild landscapes remind us of the unsearched territories of the mind. The light over a landscape is never a simple brightness; it is mixed and muted. Clouds love to play with light. A cloud can suddenly introduce shadow and reduce a glistening field to an eerie grey space. Or alternatively, a cloud-shadow can modulate the depth of colour a hillside receives. This alternating choreography can turn hillsides purple, green or even cream, depending on how the angle of light and the cloud’s shadow conspire with each other. The visual effect is often breathtaking. Light is the great priestess of landscape. Deftly it searches out unnoticed places, corners of fields, the shadow-veils of certain bushes, the angled certainty of stones; it can slink low behind a stone wall turning the spaces between the stones into windows of gold. On a winter’s evening it can set a black tree into poignant relief. Unable to penetrate the earth, light knows how to tease suggestions of depth from surface. Where radiance falls, depths gather to the surface as to a window. The persuasions of light bring us frequent mirrors that afford us a glimpse into the mystery that dwells in us. Sometimes in the radiance, forgotten treasure glimmers through ‘earthen vessels’.

The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigour and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes its time. The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here.

The beauty of the imagination is that it can discover such magnificent vastness inside a tiny space. Our culture is dominated by quantity. Even those who have plenty hunger for more and more. Everywhere around us, the reign of quantity extends and multiplies. Sadly the voyage of greed has all the urgency but no sense of destination. Desire becomes inflated and loses all sense of vision and proportion. When beauty becomes an acquisition it brings no delight. When time seemed longer and slower, the eye of the beholder had more space and distance to glimpse the beautiful. There was respect for the worlds that could be suggested by a glimpse. A striking illustration of this can be seen in the traditional cottages in the West of Ireland. These cottages were often built in the most beautiful landscapes. Yet the windows were always small. There was certainly a practical rationale behind this. There was no central heating then and there was a lot of rain and cold. Yet a small window exercised a discipline of proportion in relation to the external beauty. It never offered you the whole landscape: instead, from every angle you looked, it chose from the landscape a unique icon for your eyes. The grace of limit suggested more than your eyes could visually grasp. But times have changed. People who now build here insist on huge windows that flood the house from every side with landscape. If one inquires about the particular rhythm of the place or the patterns of light the owners often seem baffled. The total view detracts from the eye’s refinement.

T

HE

B

EAUTY OF

O

PPOSITES IN THE

L

ITURGY OF

T

WILIGHT

IN THE WEST OF IRELAND THE LAND IS GENERALLY POOR. FARMING and survival have always been difficult and people have had to work hard for a living. In winter the weather shows little mercy. The endless rain tends to darken the spirit. Yet mysteriously there is an ancient conversation between the ocean and the stone on this coastline which is mirrored in the complexity of twilight. There is great beauty in how the light takes its leave of the day. From the first blush of dawn, the day is carried everywhere by the light. Time unfolds in light. In the morning, light clears all the outside darkness and the shape of each thing emerges in the brightened emptiness. Light identifies itself completely with the voyage of a day; its transparency puts the day out in the open. There is nowhere for a day to hide; it is exposed every minute to the revelations of light. Perhaps this is why twilight appears gracious; when light abandons the day, it does not believe that it will ever return and consequently permits itself an extravagant valediction in a huge ritual of colour. The silence of twilight is striking because the flourish of the colouring has the grandeur of music.