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We ask that streams of Easter light might flow into the intimacy and privacy of our hearts this morning, to heal us and encourage us and enable us to make again a new beginning.
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light
encouragement
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John O'Donohue |
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When you have moments on your own or spaces in your time, just focus on the well at the root of your soul. Imagine that nourishing stream of belonging, ease, peace, and delight. Feel, with your visual imagination, the refreshing waters of that well gradually flowing up through the arid earth of the neglected side of your heart. It is helpful to imagine this particularly before you sleep. Then during the night you will be in a constant flow ..
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John O'Donohue |
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Love is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes.
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John O'Donohue |
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The longing at the heart of attraction is for union with the Beautiful.
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John O'Donohue |
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The earth is full of thresholds where beauty awaits the wonder of our gaze.
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John O'Donohue |
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Is it not possible that a place could have huge affection for those who dwell there? Perhaps your place loves having you there. It misses you when you are away and in its secret way rejoices when you return. Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That it could sense your presence and feel the care you extend towards it? Perhaps your favourite place feels proud of you.
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John O'Donohue |
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The hunger to belong is at the heart of our nature. Cut off from others, we atrophy and turn in on ourselves. The sense of belonging is the natural balance of our lives. Mostly, we do not need to make an issue of belonging. When we belong, we take it for granted. There is some innocent childlike side to the human heart that is always deeply hurt when we are excluded. Belonging suggests warmth, understanding, and embrace. No one was created ..
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John O'Donohue |
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The beautiful can exist at the edge precisely because it has nothing to lose and everything to give away. FREDERICK TURNER OUR
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John O'Donohue |
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The interplay between farmers and the elements was a poem without words, the echo which would always return to him. The air could hold the "breeze of the rain" or the "wind of warmth" to the discerning nose. The stone carved its memory deep into the hands that chiseled it. Fire was life in the hearth which was the center of home. Water introduced itself to us from its most natural source in streams and wells."
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John O'Donohue |
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In our mediocrity and distraction, we forget that we are privileged to live in a wondrous universe.
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John O'Donohue |
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THE INNER HISTORY OF A DAY No one knew the name of this day; Born quietly from deepest night, It hid its face in light, Demanded nothing for itself, Opened out to offer each of us A field of brightness that traveled ahead, Providing in time, ground to hold our footsteps And the light of thought to show the way. The mind of the day draws no attention; It dwells within the silence with elegance
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John O'Donohue |
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To create a space for all our words, Drawing us to listen inward and outward. We seldom notice how each day is a holy place Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens, Transforming our broken fragments Into an eternal continuity that keeps us. Somewhere in us a dignity presides That is more gracious than the smallness That fuels us with fear and force, A dignity that trusts the form a day takes. So at the end of this day, we give thanks Fo..
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John O'Donohue |
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Through friendship and love, you learn to attune yourself to the silence, to the thresholds of mystery where your life enters the life of your beloved and the beloved's life enters yours.
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John O'Donohue |
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You are as young as you feel. If you begin to feel the warmth of your soul,
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John O'Donohue |
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A day is precious because each day is essentially the microcosm of your whole life. Each new day offers possibilities and promises that were never seen before. To engage with honor the full possibility of your life is to engage in a worthy way the possibility of your new day. Each day is different.
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John O'Donohue |
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Our hunger to belong is the longing to find a bridge across the distance from isolation to intimacy. Every one longs for intimacy and dreams of a nest of belonging in which one is embraced, seen, and loved. Something within each of us cries out for belonging. We can have all the world has to offer in terms of status, achievement, and possessions. Yet without a sense of belonging it all seems empty and pointless.
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John O'Donohue |
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Poetry is the place where language in its silence is most beautifully articulated. Poetry is the language of silence.
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John O'Donohue |
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We have often heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is usually taken to mean that the sense of beauty is utterly subjective; there is no accounting for taste because each person's taste is different. The statement has another, more subtle meaning: if our style of looking become beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us. We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful ..
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John O'Donohue |
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Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity. You should belong first in your own interiority. If you belong there, and if you are in rhythm with yourself and connected to that deep, unique source within, then you will never be vulnerable when your outside belonging is qualified, relativized, or taken away. You will be able to stand on your own ground, the ground of your soul, where you are not a tenant, where you are at home. ..
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house-of-belonging
true-belonging
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John O'Donohue |
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The Celtic understanding of friendship finds its inspiration and culmination in the sublime notion of the anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul; cara is the word for friend. So anam cara means soul friend. The anam cara was a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention and category. You ..
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John O'Donohue |
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And when we come to search for God, Let us first be robed in night, Put on the mind of morning To feel the rush of light Spread slowly inside The color and stillness Of a found world.
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John O'Donohue |
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The human heart is a theater of longing.
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interdependence
nature
love
dependant-origination
celtic-spirituality
communion
community
longing
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John O'Donohue |
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When you find the person you love, an act of ancient recognition brings you together.
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John O'Donohue |
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listening to music renews the heart precisely for this reason: it plumbs the gravity of sorrow until it finds the point of submerged light and lightness. Listening to music stirs the heavy heart; it alters the gravity. Unconsciously it schools us in a different way to hold sorrow. When the music is dark it works through dissonance and harsh notes; like underpainting their beauty is slow to reveal itself but it does ultimately dawn. It frees..
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John O'Donohue |
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A Blessing for Death I pray that you will have the blessing of being consoled and sure about your own death. May you know in your soul that there is no need to be afraid. When your time comes, may you be given every blessing and shelter that you need. May there be a beautiful welcome for you in the home that you are going to. You are not going somewhere strange. You are going back to the home that you never left. May you have a wonderful ur..
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John O'Donohue |
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May I have the courage today To live the life that I would love, To postpone my dream no longer But do at last what I came here for And waste my heart on fear no more.
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John O'Donohue |
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How can we ever know the difference we make to the soul of the earth? Where the infinite stillness of the earth meets the passion of the human eye, invisible depths strain towards the mirror of the name. In the word, the earth breaks silence.
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John O'Donohue |
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At a deeper level, each person is the custodian of a completely private, individual world.
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John O'Donohue |
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This earth is the only constant in our lives. It has been here for millions of years before us. It was his gift to unearth its riches; that this "human-come-lately" is but the latest link in the chain of evolution. We must become aware of our present stage of "becoming" and to do this we need to look back at our history."
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John O'Donohue |
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The false burdens fall away. We come into rhythm with ourselves. Our clay shape gradually learns to walk beautifully on this magnificent earth. A
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John O'Donohue |
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To young mind, work seemed to be the price that was gladly paid for the privilege of living so closely with the earth. Work was a real conversation with the landscape. It was not an abuse or raiding of the landscape. It was amazing to learn how to work in this context.
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John O'Donohue |
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The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure.
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John O'Donohue |
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We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious; we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time, we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos.
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earth
nature
impermanence
mindfulness
existentialism
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John O'Donohue |
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THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH IS THE FIRST BEAUTY. MILLIONS OF years before us the earth lived in wild elegance. Landscape is the first-born of creation. Sculpted with huge patience over millennia, landscape has enormous diversity of shape, presence and memory.
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John O'Donohue |
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A horizon is something towards which we move, but it's also something that moves along with us - Hans Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method)
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John O'Donohue |
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Only the blindness of habit convinces us that we continue to live in the same place, that we see the same landscape. In truth, no place ever remains the same because light has no mind for repetition; it adores difference. Through its illuminations, it strives to suggest the silent depths that hide in the dark. Light
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John O'Donohue |
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The most exuberant expression of the body is in dance. Dance theater is wonderful. The dance becomes fluent sculpture. The body shapes the emptiness poignantly and majestically. The
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John O'Donohue |
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If you could trust your soul, you would receive every blessing you require. Life itself is the great sacrament through which we are wounded and healed. If we live everything, life will be faithful to us. O
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John O'Donohue |
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Time unfolds in light. In the morning, light clears all the outside darkness and the shape of each thing emerges in the brightened emptiness. Light identifies itself completely with the voyage of a day; its transparency puts the day out in the open. There is nowhere for a day to hide; it is exposed every minute to the revelations of light. Perhaps this is why twilight appears gracious; when light abandons the day, it does not believe that i..
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John O'Donohue |
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The wonder of an object is that it is not a thought. A thing is first and foremost itself. An inconsequential pebble picked up on the side of the road has preceded us by anything up to four hundred million years, and its face will be brightened still further by rain that will fall here thousands of years after we have vanished. We might change things in the world, yet the most minimal, seemingly insignificant object outlasts us.
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John O'Donohue |
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To look at something that can gaze back at you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen your sense of vision.
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John O'Donohue |
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Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace.
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John O'Donohue |
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FOR THE TIME OF NECESSARY DECISION The mind of time is hard to read. We can never predict what it will bring, Nor even from all that is already gone Can we say what form it finally takes; For time gathers its moments secretly. Often we only know it's time to change When a force has built inside the heart That leaves us uneasy as we are. Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul Or the love where we once belonged Calls nothing alive in us any..
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John O'Donohue |
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You travel certainly, in every sense of the word. But you take with you everything that you have been, just as the landscape stores up its own past. Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.
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nature
celtic-spirituality
hospitality
home
longing
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John O'Donohue |