Anam Cara

Since I was a child, one of the things that always haunted me was the way everything passes away. In relation to death, that is the ultimate transience, when someone you love goes away, falls away out of visibility into the invisibility of death. I often think there is a place where our vanished days gather, and that place is memory. One of the fascinating things about old people is the way that they stay around the well of memory. If you are willing to sit with them, you won’t get analytical sentences from them about was it this or was it that, or could the meaning have been one, two, three. What you will always get is narrative about events from their childhood, which are never straight replications of what happened, but are the bones of the event, enfleshed with image and with anecdote and with narrative. In a strange way, nothing is ever lost or forgotten; everything that befalls us remains within us. There is within you the presence in a refined sense of everything that has ever happened to you, and if you go looking for it you will find it. I always think that in our time, memory has been hijacked by the computer industry, and the more correct term is “recall” rather than “memory.” Memory is a particularly intimate and sacramental human phenomenon and there is a great depth and density to everyone. The image in nature that is really profound in relation to that is the tree; all the rings of memory enfold all the years of growing, blossoming, dying, budding, blossoming, growing, dying, and enfold all the elements of experience. In a similar way, within the clay part of each soul, the rings of memory are there and you can find them.

A lot of the experiences that we have in the world are torn, broken, hard experiences, and in broken, difficult, lonesome experiences you earn a quality of light that is very precious. I often think of it as quarried light. When you come through a phase of pain or isolation or suffering, the light that is given to you at the end of that is a very precious light, and really when you go into something similar again, it is the only kind of light that can mind you. It is the lantern that will bring you through that pain.

One of our difficulties in contemporary culture is this massive amnesia. We forget so much because we are addicted to the moment. If sad, difficult things have happened to you, and you have earned quarried light, again and again you should visit the light, and almost like the light around the tabernacle that signals the presence, you should allow that light to come round you to awaken the presence that is in you, to calm you, to bring you contentment, and as well to bring you courage. When a person is aging, one of the things he really needs is courage.

I love the word “careless.” You know the way people say, “Well, he’s a careless kind of an individual.” In one sense, that can mean that there is no responsibility in him. In its literal sense it can mean that he is care-less, that there are no false burdens of care on him, and that when he comes to the threshold of an experience, he enters it with full availability, full courage and full wildness. It would be lovely in old age, as the body sheds its power, if each of us who would be pilgrims into that time could shed the false gravity and the weight that we carry for a lot of our lives and if we could enter our old age almost like a baby enters childhood, with the same kind of gracefulness, of possibility, and the same kind of innocence, but a second innocence rather than a first one.

POSSIBILITY