John O'Donohue Quotes

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.

All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking.

I am lonesome for all the conversations we never had.

Television and the computer world are great empty shadow-lands. 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.

To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.

...
Suddenly, your voice
Calling out my name.
I call yours.
The echoes take us
To the heart of the mountains.
When the silence closes,
You say: Now that they
Have called our names back
The mountains can
Never forget us.

When he let the loneliness flow, let the dam burst within, something shifted in his relation to his own loneliness.... He became free once he had met the depth of his loneliness, engaged and befriended it. It became a natural part of his life.

Within the grip of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The gray perished landscape is shorn of color. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are wakening up. Colors are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bug opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of color emerges.

The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual slow beat always inching its way forward; change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it.

FOR BELONGING May you listen to your longing to be free. May the frames of your belonging be generous enough for your dreams. May you arise each day with a voice of blessing whispering in your heart. May you find a harmony between your soul and your life. May the sanctuary of your soul never become haunted. May you know the eternal longing that lives at the heart of time. May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within. May you never place walls between the light and yourself. May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.

One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen.

The mind of blessing is wise, and it knows that whatever torments or diminishes a person cannot be healed simply from within that diminishment; consequently it addresses the wholeness and draws that light and healing into the diminished area.

Kathleen Raine, a Scottish poet, says that unless you see a thing in the light of love, you do not see it at all. Love is the light in which we see light.

The beauty of being human is the capacity and desire for intimacy. Yet we know that even those who are most intimate remain strange to us. Like children, we often “make strange” with each other.

Our grounding in the soul means that regardless of how badly we think of ourselves, there is a wholesomeness in us that no one has ever been able to damage.

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 a space to let in lightness. Unlike anything else in the world, music is neither image nor word and yet it can say and show more than a painting or poem.