John O'Donohue Quotes

The real mystery is not that things are the way they are, but that there is something rather than nothing.

in the cry of a well that slips from dark
the earth began to dream you; how it would
polish from precious stones dust for a face,
from tears of sycamores tone for your eyes.

In the letters between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya there is the beautiful recognition: “When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, its sound is often no louder than the beating of your heart and it is very easy to miss it.

Our age is also very functional. There are goals and purposes and programs for everything. The lovely thing about Eckhart is his absolute suspicion of the program. People got hooked on a program which became an end in itself. Our world today is haunted and obsessed by functional thinking which sees everything in terms of a process. Eckhart keeps God and the mystical way totally free of that thinking. He says that God is God and without a why: non habet quare; Ipsum est quare omnium et omnibus — He is the why of everything and to everything. A later follower of Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, wrote a beautiful short mystical poem called “Ohne Warum” (Without Why): The rose is without why She blooms because she blooms She does not care for herself Asks not if she is seen One of the beautiful things in Eckhart is the idea of letting things be. So many people wonder what they should do, how they should work. For Eckhart, none of this matters. The most important thing to focus on is how you should be. That is really mindfulness of presence. All intimacy, love, belonging, creativity is not when the grubby little hands of our functional minds get into the mystery, but when we stand back and let the mystery be, become enveloped in it so that it extends us and deepens us. Finally, Eckhart has the lovely idea of Gelassenheit. Gelassen is the German for “calmness.” Even when things go against you and the rhythm in your life takes you to awkward and lonely places, you can still maintain a stillness which is in your soul and will connect you and give you an inviolable belonging and togetherness. You won’t get that from a program but you can awaken it in your own heart. For Presence

...

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.

...
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.

breakthroughs in the evolution of human consciousness will be the recognition of the subtle complexity and the hidden inner world that animals carry around with them. The innocence and silence of the animal world has a huge subtlety to it that is anything but dumb, but rather notices everything and is present in everything. Animals carry a huge ministry of witness to the silence of time and to the depth of nature. They are like the landscape in a sense: they live too in the mode of silence.

In each person, there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for the things we need from within.

The loving vision does not become entangled in the agenda of power, seduction, opposition, or complicity. Such loving is creative and subversive. It rises above the pathetic arithmetic of blame and judgement and engages experience at the level of origin, structure, and destiny.

Person als Vermittlung (The Person as Mediator)

One of the questions that John loved to pose was “when was your last great conversation with someone?” Good conversation chases the truth of things, it demolishes the flimsy foundation of facade, and it penetrates the depths so as to soar unto unfolding possibility.

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.

A good beginning is half the work.

If we could be mindful of how short our time is, we might learn how precious each day is.

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 cam here for and waste my heart on fear no more.