Anam Cara

Friendship in particular should be a wonderful kind of togetherness where each of the friends encourages and liberates each other into the fullness of their own potential. Friends very often become habitual with each other and they limit the potential of their friendship. If you feel with your friend that you are called to the outer frontiers, then the friendship is in growth, and it also has a bit of danger in it, and a risk; and without risk in the world of the soul, nothing really grows. It’s lovely when you meet people that were maybe very set in their days and in their ways, and maybe because of illness, or because of friendship or love, or some kind of awakening, suddenly the scene changes and they acknowledge, as Antonio Machado, the Spanish poet, says, that they are now in a different world. That sense of difference and otherness is always what makes us wonder. When I see predictability and habit and similarity, I am always wondering what is hidden underneath. Or when I see really good people, or really good families, I ask myself, where is the dark stuff hidden here? What is buried under the gleaming surface? Because every image is partial, and most images have a great falsity in them. When you get below the image level to the river of otherness and difference that is in every soul, that is when your eyes fill with wonder. You realize that maybe just for a little second, you are getting a glimpse of another world that is somehow there behind what you thought you knew. The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez was asked by his friend and fellow writer Mendoza, in a wonderful collection of conversations, what did he think of his wife, Mercedes? Márquez, who has been with Mercedes for forty years now, said to Mendoza, “I know her so well now, that I haven’t the slightest idea who she is.” I think that is familiarity as an invitation to absolute wonder.

FEAR

Fear is a force that can turn that which is real, meaningful, warm, gentle and kind in your life into devastation and desert. It is a powerful force. Fear derives its power also from time and from the fragility of the human heart. Because there is both time and distance between us and everything else inside us, very often the way we are towards these things becomes fearful because we get insecure. To link in with the theme of this conversation, I feel that fear is negative wonder. It is the point at which wonder begins to consume itself and scrape off the essence of things. It begins to people realities with ghost figures. It makes the self feel vulnerable and it can take away all the loveliness from your experience and from your friendships, and even from your action and your work. The reason fear has so much power is that fear is the sister of death, and that death works through fear an awful lot. I don’t believe that death comes at the end of life. I believe your death was there at your birth with you. It was the unknown presence. Every step of the road of your life that you take, your death is beside you. Death often works through the vehicle of fear, so as you begin to transfigure your own fear, you are actually transfiguring the presence of your own death. At the end of your life, when death comes, it won’t be some kind of monster forcefully expelling you from the familiar into the unknown, but it can actually be a friend who hides the most truthful image of your own soul. Each day, however, you have to work at transfiguring the fear.

The best story I know about fear is a story from India. It is several thousand years old, and it is a story about a man who was condemned to spend a night in a cell with a poisonous snake. If he made the slightest little stir, the snake was on top of him and he was dead. So he stood in the corner of the cell, opposite where the snake was, and he was petrified. He barely dared to breathe for fear of alerting the snake, and he stood stiff and petrified all night long. As the first bars of light began to come into the cell at dawn, he began to make out the shape of the snake, and he was saying to himself, wasn’t I lucky that I never stirred. But when the full force of light came in with the full dawn, he noticed that it wasn’t a snake at all. It was an old rope. Now the story is banal, but the moral of the story is very profound: in a lot of the rooms of our minds, there are harmless old ropes thrown in corners, but when our fear begins to work on them, we convert them into monsters who hold us prisoners in the bleakest, most impoverished rooms of our hearts. Outside these rooms there are glories waiting for us, but we remain transfixed in the panic of fear’s awful falsity.

LIGHT