Anam Cara

THE HUMAN MIND IS IN ITSELF A WORLD WITH HUGE MOUNTAINS, deep valleys and forests of the unknown. Given the private depths, deep strangeness and wonders of our interior life, it is amazing that we can reach out towards the world and to each other with such intimacy and understanding. More amazing still is our ability to make everything so familiar and normal that we actually succeed in forgetting how strange and wondrous it is to be here. Rilke said: ‘Being here is so much.’ We turn the mystery and strangeness of this world into our private territory. We make a home out of the world. Life becomes predictable and we function automatically within our frames: route to work, colleagues, friends, patterns of thinking and feeling, the faces of the family, etc. Without sensing it, we become lost inside the automatic traffic of functioning. It is only when something goes wrong that we are hauled back to the edge. Quite abruptly the familiar map has melted and territories that were sure ground an hour ago don’t exist any more. Heidegger said that it is only when a hammer does not work that you suddenly realize that it is a hammer.

It is tragic that something has to go wrong before we can realize the gift of the world and our lives, gifts we could never have dreamed or earned. When something goes deeply wrong, the realization it forces is inevitably learned at the grave of loss. If we were able to live in a deeper state of awareness and wisdom, our days on earth would find a new frequency: spaces would open naturally for beauty to touch us and we need beauty as deeply as we need love. Beauty is not an extra luxury, an accidental experience that we happen to have if we are lucky. Beauty dwells at the heart of life. If we can free ourselves from our robot-like habits of predictability, repetition and function, we begin to walk differently on the earth. We come to dwell more in the truth of beauty. Ontologically, beauty is the secret sound of the deepest thereness of things. To recognize and celebrate beauty is to recognize the ultimate sacredness of experience, to glimpse the subtle embrace of belonging where we are wed to the divine, the beauty of every moment, of every thing.

Beauty loves freedom; then it is no surprise that we engage beauty through the imagination. The imagination always goes beyond the frames and cages of the expected and predictable. The imagination loves possibility and freedom is the ether where possibility lives. Uncharted territories are always beckoning. Beauty is at home in this realm of the invisible, the unexpected and the unknown. It emerges from its own depths, sure in poise and generous in possibility. Yet there is a certain disturbance in the call of beauty, a displacement. As T.S. Eliot says in ‘Journey of the Magi’: we can no longer be at ease in the old dispensation. We are forced to recognize something new, something that shows up the limitations we have accepted and our subtle but deadening compromises. Beauty calls us beyond ourselves and it encourages us to engage the dream that dwells in the soul.

One time in Atlanta, Georgia, I noticed the constant presence of a certain weed by the roadside. I asked what its name was. I was told that it was the ‘kudzu’ weed which could grow a foot long in a day. When I returned home and reflected on my trip, the kudzu struck me as a precise metaphor for consumerism. Most of us move now in such a thicket of excess that we can no longer make out the real contours of things. Where there is entanglement, there is no perspective or clarity to make out the true identity of anything. We need to make a clearance in order to begin to see where we are and who we are; then we can discover true proportion. And without a sense of proportion, we cannot recognize beauty.

T

HE

L

EGEND

O

F

T

HE

GLAS GABHNA

IT IS INCREDIBLE HOW BLINDNESS AND HABIT HAVE DULLED OUR minds. We live in the midst of abundance and feel like paupers. Our lonely emptiness seems to be the result of our desire to turn everything into product. Only if it becomes a product does a thing become real. Like the surrealistic sculptures of Jean Tinguely, we reduce beauty to contorted shapes that bring us neither shelter nor invitation.