Anam Cara

One of the most amazing recognitions of the human mind is that time passes. Everything that we experience somehow passes into a past invisible place: when you think of yesterday and the things that were troubling you and worrying you, and the intentions that you had and the people that you met, and you know you experienced them all, but when you look for them now, they are nowhere—they have vanished. One of the questions that has always puzzled me is, is there a place where our vanished days secretly gather? To put it another way, like the medieval mystics used to ask, where does the light go when the candle is blown out? It seems to me that our times are very concerned with experience, and that nowadays to hold a belief, to have a value must be woven through the loom of one’s own experience, and that experience is the touchstone of integrity, verification and authenticity. And yet the destiny of every experience is that it will disappear. It’s a great consolation of course that things do actually disappear, especially when you feel bad. There was a contest of wisdom one time in ancient Greece to find who could write down a sentence which would somehow always be true. The sentence that won the competition was “This too will pass.” One of my favorite thinkers in the feminine and mystical tradition is Teresa of Avila. She cautioned that in bad, lonesome, difficult times, you should never forget that this too will actually pass. So there is a shelter and a kindness in that acknowledgment of transience. But there’s also a desperate loneliness in transience, in knowing the one that you love, the beautiful time that you are having, the lovely things that are happening to you will all actually disappear.

MEMORY

So is there a place where our vanished days secretly gather? I think there is, and I believe the name of that place is memory. Memory to me is one of the great sources, one of the great treasure houses, of wonder. You look at humans walking around on streets, in houses, in churches, out in fields, and you realize that each one of these creatures is carrying within herself or himself a whole harvest of lived experience. You can actually go back within yourself to great things that have happened to you and enjoy them and allow them to shelter and bless you again. One of the negative aspects of contemporary life is that there is such disrespect for memory. Memory is now attributed to computers, but computers do not have memory—they have hijacked the notion. Memory now seems to be focused almost exclusively on past woundedness and hurt, some of it induced, some of it real. It’s sad that people don’t use their good memories and revisit again and again the harvest of memory that is within them, and live out of the riches of that harvest, rather than out of the poverty of their woundedness. Hegel, a philosopher I love, said, “The wounds of the spirit heal and they leave no scars.” If we can somehow bring the difficult things with us into the realm and the light of our souls, it is unbelievable the healing that will achieve itself in us. I think that we are infinitely greater than our minds and we are infinitely more than our images of ourselves. One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts. We should never forget that death is waiting for us. A man in Connemara said one time to a friend of mine, Beidh muid sínte siar, a dúirt sé, cúig mhilliúin bliain déag faoin chré—we’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years, and we have a short exposure. I feel that when you recognize that death is on its way, it is a great liberation, because it means that you can in some way feel the call to live everything that is within you. One of the greatest sins is the unlived life, not to allow yourself to become chief executive of the project you call your life, to have a reverence always for the immensity that is inside of you. Nietzsche saw with devastating clarity the collusion that society actually is. He stripped back the layers of lies, pretension and gamesmanship, and he got down to the wild flow of energy in the well of the soul. It is impossible as a humanoid to stop the well of energy and the well of light and the well of life that is inside you. You might calm it and quell it, but it will still rise up within you.

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