Anam Cara
It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. N one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through the opening of the mouth, we bring out sounds form the mountain beneath the soul. These sounds are words. The world is full of words. There are so many talking all the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on television, on radio, in the paper, in books. The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us. We take each other's sounds and make patterns, predictions, benedictions, and blasphenies. Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the world together. Yet the uttering of the world reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.
Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace. Nowhere else is ther such intimate and frightening access to the mysterium. Friendship is the sweet grace that liberates us to approach, recognize and inhabit this adventure. Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimace is the secret law of life and the universe. The human journey is a continuous act of transfiguration. If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negitive and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us. As an artist, the human person is permanently active in this revelation. The imagination is the great friend of the unknown. Endlessly, it invokes and releases the power of possibility. Friendship, then, is not to be reduced to an exclusive or sentimental relationship; it is a far more extensive and intensive force.
The understanding of friendship finds its inspiration and culmination in the sublime notion of anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul, Cara the Gaelic word for friend. Thus Anam Cara means soul friend . The anam cara is a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intamacies of your life. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you have an anam cara, your friendship cuts across all convention and category. The Anam Cara is a radiant source of wisdom, a link between the human and the divine- a blessed, rare gem. You are joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul. It is the recognition and awakening of the ancient belonging between two friends. Since the birth of the human heart is an ongoing process, love is the continuous birth of creativity within and between us. Longing is the presence of the divine and the soul is the house of belonging.
When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected inner wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of the inner landscape. Solitude is lumnous, and silence is the sister of the divine.
The human heart is never completly born.
I should go to bed before I go off on other random philosophical rantings. You think I'm bad when I'm tierd, you should see me when I'm drunk. I've been known to sit and discuss philosophy untill well after sunrise (just before sunrise is when the darkness becomes deepest and more anonymous- the threashold between the worlds, you stand at the viel of mysteries....enough, Cara)
Ah well. G'night, and don't think too hard.
Cara
Ok, one more thing.
Bennacht
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the gray window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colors,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the curach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may ther come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace. Nowhere else is ther such intimate and frightening access to the mysterium. Friendship is the sweet grace that liberates us to approach, recognize and inhabit this adventure. Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimace is the secret law of life and the universe. The human journey is a continuous act of transfiguration. If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negitive and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us. As an artist, the human person is permanently active in this revelation. The imagination is the great friend of the unknown. Endlessly, it invokes and releases the power of possibility. Friendship, then, is not to be reduced to an exclusive or sentimental relationship; it is a far more extensive and intensive force.
The understanding of friendship finds its inspiration and culmination in the sublime notion of anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul, Cara the Gaelic word for friend. Thus Anam Cara means soul friend . The anam cara is a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intamacies of your life. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you have an anam cara, your friendship cuts across all convention and category. The Anam Cara is a radiant source of wisdom, a link between the human and the divine- a blessed, rare gem. You are joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul. It is the recognition and awakening of the ancient belonging between two friends. Since the birth of the human heart is an ongoing process, love is the continuous birth of creativity within and between us. Longing is the presence of the divine and the soul is the house of belonging.
When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected inner wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of the inner landscape. Solitude is lumnous, and silence is the sister of the divine.
The human heart is never completly born.
I should go to bed before I go off on other random philosophical rantings. You think I'm bad when I'm tierd, you should see me when I'm drunk. I've been known to sit and discuss philosophy untill well after sunrise (just before sunrise is when the darkness becomes deepest and more anonymous- the threashold between the worlds, you stand at the viel of mysteries....enough, Cara)
Ah well. G'night, and don't think too hard.
Cara
Ok, one more thing.
Bennacht
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the gray window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colors,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the curach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may ther come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.