Anam Cara

More often than not, we feel so enmeshed in the life we have that the prospect of change appears remote or impossible. Thus, we continue on the tracks that we have laid down for ourselves. We are unable to think in new ways and we gradually teach ourselves to forget the other horizons. We unlearn desire. Quietly, over time, we succumb to the dependable script of the expected life and become masters of the middle way. We avoid extremes and after a while we no longer even notice the pathways off to the side and no longer sense the danger and disturbance that could be experienced ‘out there’. We learn to fit our chosen world with alarming precision and regularity. Often it takes a huge crisis or trauma to crack the dead shell that has grown ever more solid around us. Painful as that can be, it does resurrect the longing of the neglected soul. It makes a clearance. Again we can see the horizons and feel their attraction. Though we may wince with vulnerability as we taste the exhilaration of freedom, we feel alive! ‘Oceans’ by Juan Ramón Jiménez captures this beautifully:

I have a feeling that my boat

has struck, down there in the depths,

against a great thing.

And nothing

happens! Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .

– Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,

And are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

(translated by Robert Bly)

The awakening of individuality is a continual unfolding of our presence. Individuality is not a thing or a position, nor the act of fixed or stolid identity. Individuality is the creative voyage of aloneness in which the gifts and limitations of real presence emerge. The nature of the beginning inevitably holds the rhythm of the future. The secret of individuality is powerfully suggested by the act of birth. We come to the earth in an intensely vulnerable way, for birth is an act of separation. We are cast out into the emptiness as the cord is cut, yet the wound of connection remains open for the visitation of beauty.

E

MERGENCE

:

B

REAKING THE

S

HELL FROM

I

NSIDE

The sadness and despair of beauty laid bare.

HERMANN BROCH

WE USED TO HAVE HENS ON THE FARM. EVERY YEAR CERTAIN HENS would offer themselves for the adventure of love and motherhood. The sequence of events usually began when a hen would distinguish herself through accentuated ‘clucking’. The adult powers intuited that she was having a passionate liaison; consequently, she was chosen to sit for weeks on a collection of eggs. With the warmth of her feathered body she hatched the eggs. If the weather was very cold and the eggs were almost hatched, my mother would bring them in beside our kitchen fire. Then over days the new chicks would begin to emerge from the eggs. Again the journey was signalled through sound. You would hear the little chicks’ beaks faintly tapping at the inside of the shell. Then the sound would become louder and gradually from the inside the shell would be cracked open. The plastic-like inner sealing of the shell would appear. You would see the little beak push against it, almost the way a finger does inside a balloon. Then the sealing would break and the next thing a wet little yellow-haired, greased-up chick would waddle out, looking wet and miserable and fumbling in its movements. After a while it would dry and become the sweetest little creature adorned in a fine fur of golden feathers.

When we are wounded, we close up. Rather than soft, porous skin growing back over the opening, we decide to grow a shell. This idea came to expression in the following poem:

F

OSSIL

No

Don’t cry

For there is no

One to tell,

A mild shell

Spreads

Over every opening

Every ear

Eye

Mouth

Pore

Nose

Genital,

A mildness of shell

Impenetrable

To even

The bladed scream;

Soon

All will be

Severed echo,

And the dead

So long

So unbearably long

Outside and

Neglected

Will claim

Their time.