Anam Cara

It sings and I hear its song,

Then what I am afraid of comes,

I live for a while in its sight

What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it

leaves me.

It sings and I hear its song

After days of labor, mute in my consternations

I hear my song at last, and I sing it.

As we sing, the day turns, the trees move.

In Praise of the Earth

Let us bless

The imagination of the Earth.

That knew early the patience

To harness the mind of time,

Waited for the seas to warm,

Ready to welcome the emergence

Of things dreaming of voyaging

Among the stillness of land.

And how light knew to nurse

The growth until the face of the earth

Brightens beneath a vision of color

When the ages of ice came

And sealed the earth inside

An endless coma of cold,

The heart of the earth held hope,

Storing fragments of memory,

Ready for the return of the sun.

Let us thank the Earth

That offers ground for home

And holds our feet firm

To walk in space open

To infinite galaxies.

Let us salute the silence,

And certainty of mountains:

Their sublime stillness,

Their dream-filled hearts.

The wonder of a garden

Trusting the first warmth of spring

Until its black infinity of cells

Becomes charged with dream;

Then the silent, slow nurture

Of the seed’s self, coaxing it

To trust the act of death.

The humility of the earth

That transfigures all

That has fallen

Of outlived growth.

The kindness of the earth,

Opening to receive

Our worn forms

Into the final stillness.

Let us ask forgiveness of the earth

For all our sins against her:

For our violence and poisonings

Of her beauty.

Let us remember within us

The ancient clay,

Holding the memory of seasons,

The passion of the wind,

The fluency of water,

The warmth of fire,

The quiver-touch of the sun

And shadowed sureness of the moon.

That we may awaken,

To live to the full

The dream of the earth

Who chose us to emerge

And incarnate its hidden night

In mind, spirit and light.

From To Bless the Space Between Us

ABSENCE

“While we are here in the world, where is it that we are absent from?”

I produced “The Open Mind” for RTÉ Radio from 1989 to 2002. Each year we featured “The Open Mind Guest Lecture”—a talk given before an invited audience in the Radio Centre, RTÉ, by a guest speaker. Speakers over the years included Gordon Wilson, Michael D. Higgins, Erskine Childers, John Hume, Anne Fine and George Mitchell. The subjects varied from Northern Ireland to children’s books. In 1997, I invited John to give the lecture and he chose as his topic—“Towards a Philosophy of Absence.”

Absence is something that I have thought about for a long time. It is a beautiful theme. There seems to be very little written on it, and the more I thought about it, the more I became aware of how many dimensions of our lives it actually touches. I would like to begin the lecture by trying to locate the first experience of absence in some primal kind of moment.

When each of us was born, we became present to the earth and we entered into an ancient narrative of presence that preceded us by hundreds and thousands of millions of years. I think that the first experience that the earth had of real absence was when the human mind first emerged. That must have been an amazing experience for the actual earth itself. It had, up to then, created incredible masterpieces. If you ever see a twilight, with the incredible nuance and depth of color that it has; if you look at the amazing choruses of waves that beat against a shoreline; if you look at the mystical shape of mountains, the voice of streams and rivers and the undomesticable wildness of certain wilderness places, you will know that the imagination of the earth had created great beauty.

ABSENCE AND LOSS