Anam Cara

I love mountains. I feel that mountains are huge contemplatives. They are there and they are in the presence up to their necks and they are still in it and with it and within it. One of the lovely ways to pray is to take your body out into the landscape and to be still in it. Your body is made out of clay, so your body is actually a miniature landscape that has got up from under the earth and is now walking on the normal landscape. If you go out for several hours into a place that is wild, your mind begins to slow down, down, down. What is happening is that the clay of your body is retrieving its own sense of sisterhood with the great clay of the landscape. Water in a landscape is a fascinating thing as well. I often think that water is the tears of the earth’s joy and sadness. Every kind of water in a landscape has a different kind of tonality and a different kind of presence to it. You think of the stillness of a well, of the energy of a stream, of the totality of the ocean or the singularity and memory of a river. I also think that trees are incredible presences. There is incredible symmetry in a tree, between its inner life and its outer life, between its rooted memory and its external active presence. A tree grows up and grows down at once and produces enough branches to incarnate its wild divinity. It doesn’t limit itself—it reaches for the sky and it reaches for the source, all in one seamless kind of movement. So I think landscape is an incredible, mystical teacher, and when you begin to tune into its sacred presence, something shifts inside you. One of the lovely developments in consciousness as we come towards the end of the millennium is this dawning recognition that we are guests of the universe, and that landscape was the firstborn of creation and was here hundreds of millions of years before us. It knows what is actually going on. To put it in a theological way, I feel that landscape is always at prayer, and its prayer is seamless. It is always enfolded in the presence. It is a high work of imagination, because there is no repetition in a landscape. Every stone, every tree, every field is a different place. When your eye begins to become attentive to this panorama of differentiation, then you realize what a privilege it is to actually be here.

For a New Beginning

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,

Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,

Noticing how you willed yourself on,

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety

And the gray promises that sameness whispered,

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,

Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And out you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream,

A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

From To Bless the Space Between Us

MEISTER ECKHART

“There is a lonely edge to our lives which can only be filled by God.”

As the second millennium drew to a close, I conceived the idea of a series entitled “Millennium Minds.” Who were the “great minds” of the millennium and why? I put that question to a range of contributors and they chose a wide selection of minds—poets, economists, composers, politicians, saints. John O’Donohue chose an obscure medieval mystic…

Meister Eckhart is for me one of the most fascinating minds of the Western tradition—a mind that had its flowering in the early part of the millennium. He was a priest, a mystic—and officially a heretic!

Several people had recommended Eckhart to me over the years, and while looking around for mystical reading I stumbled on his sermons in a London bookshop. When I finished my doctorate on Hegel, my professor in Tübingen University suggested a post-doctorate dissertation on Eckhart. In the little town I was living in at the time, there was an antiquarian bookshop run by a cranky little man, a very conservative type. I happened to ask him one morning if he had anything on Eckhart. He disappeared upstairs and came back with seventeen dust-covered volumes which he had had for years. It seemed providential, so I set to work on Meister Eckhart.

A PEN PICTURE