The Inner Landscape of Beauty

Connemara tree

I first heard John O’Donohue’s voice during a profoundly dark season of my early adult life. I was sick as a dog, barely crawling through a brutal depression, and shut up in a proverbial dark night of the soul. My quest to save the world had been sharply aborted and turned upside-down by a mystery illness, and I’d been pretty much shipped back to a country I thought I no longer had a home in.
So there I was, very alone in a new state, working temporarily in a part-time office job someone had kindly offered me as I attempted to get treatment and maybe heal.

As anyone who’s suffered any kind of non-incidental depression knows, it was a crapton worse than any of the physical suffering I was trying to survive. I could barely think; I could barely pray; I could barely hear God or sense any kind of presence that was once so natural to breathe in. Every day after work, I’d drag myself outside to the forest by my house and trudge through the woods for half an hour in a desperate attempt to stay alive on the inside. Those days when spiritual books seemed full of dry, muted words, trudging through the forest was about as good a prayer as it got.

And then, one day a random newsprint catalog was being passed around the office advertising random overstock stuff sitting in some warehouse, calling our names. Did we want anything? I didn’t see anything interesting—except...there was this audiobook on cassette called Anam Cara. I had no idea what Anam Cara meant, but there were a bunch of Celtic knot designs on the cover along with a photo of what I [very mistakenly] thought looked like Stonehenge, and I admit I'm a sucker for Stonehenge (primarily because I’ve never seen it in real life, so they say). 

Soon, I was driving to the doctor or grocery store and sitting longer than necessary in parking lots, because I was listening to this voice with the distinct cadence of a native Irish-speaker speaking words to me about the soul, about God, about story, about pain, about connection…that I could actually hear and understand.

I probably listened to those tapes a zillion times. 

Since then, I’ve still yet to read a single book by John O’Donohue; I’d get the book…but then find that I just wanted to listen to him talk about all the things he was so excited and inspired and enlivened by. (Because reading big abstract words is a shifty business, but when John O'Donohue says them as he means them, they're authentic and pulsing with life.) So—my experience of his ideas has been solely based on listening to his voice on audiobook. And because of that, when I finally heard The Inner Landscape of Beauty,* Krista Tippett’s monumental 2007 On Being interview with him shortly before he passed on, I felt I was listening to a friend. (Although I’m sure everyone else did, too.)

Anyway, beauty is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. As in beauty will save the world beauty. Of course beauty draws every human being (whether or not we’re aware), but I don’t know that you look for it or recognize your need for it quite as desperately as you do when you’re in pain. Because it’s not simply a pretty landscape; it’s a landscape of power and presence that you see as it is only when your inner eye has been opened. And that landscape can be anywhere, strangely. So…this evening as I was driving home, I listened to John O’Donohue read his incredibly profound 2003 treatise on beauty for a few minutes. And suddenly, I had to shut off the stereo, because I realized I wasn’t really seeing anything, and I needed to see. And then the light hitting the leaves on the trees lining the freeway nearly pierced my heart.

This preamble is way too long, but I had to at least try to explain a little of why this one relatively short conversation/interview meant so much to me. I could be wrong, but I think it was the last time the voice of this philosopher/poet/scholar (who really stayed a priest even after he stepped away from official priesthood) was recorded. So tonight, I couldn’t help but return to it and distill a bit of his voice into another “found” poem. (Although I’m not sure you can really distill his voice.*) The strangest thing was that I couldn’t see these words without hearing them as he’d say them...I guess his voice is still uncannily present.

Again, none of these words are technically mine—only the spaces and dots and dashes. I do take full responsibility for playing with the connections between the words to create new sentences and thoughts (and any possible mis-juxtaposing that may have occurred). So if you don’t think something works, oops. But hopefully the heart of this great poet's wisdom comes through with the same refreshing voice, just in new form.


*If you've never heard it before, listen to the whole unedited interview. Absolutely worth your time.

If you love what you hear, consider purchasing for yourself Longing and Belonging, the brilliant collection of John O'Donohue's wonderful narrated books, available through his official posthumous author website. To say tit's worth every cent is an understatement! (Although, if it's too much for your budget, let me know and I may be able to suggest an alternate source for much less, depending on your country of residence.)

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Wind from the South, Zhang Guanghai

The Inner Landscape of Beauty

An interview with John O’Donohue  (a found poem)

I.

Still in the west of Ireland, where I live,

there’s time for things. And when God made time,

he made plenty of it.

Bare limestone laid down by some wild kind of deity—

an ancient conversation between the ocean and stone—

being a child and coming out into that—it was 
waiting like a huge wild invitation to extend 
imagination.

Emerging into a landscape

that is just as much alive as you:

if you go towards it with watchful reverence,

you will be amazed at what it will reveal to you.

You can truly receive time.

There’s an uncanny symmetry

between the way you are outward

and the way you are inward.

And I feel there is an evacuation of

interiority going on in our times.

It’s taking something from inside us.

Surface time:

1) over-structured and

stolen from you;

2) to mistake glamour

for beauty.

Time has become the enemy.

You have become its target and victim.

We vacate our language and evict spirit from it.

We lose sight of how strange we are.

We have no idea what will land on the

shoreline of morning tomorrow.

There’s no fixed world;

the world is coming toward you

and you’re coming toward it,

and between the two of you,

you construct the world.

It’s never as given as it looks;

you’re always receiving and shaping.

So when the mind draws barriers so that

there’s no longer porous space for breathing,

the imagination is committed

to a justice of wholeness.

Draw back inside.

Imagine the surface of the ocean, restless.

Then slip down deep below the surface

where it’s still and things move slower.

There is a place in the soul that neither time,

nor space, nor created thing can touch.

There is a place in you where

there’s a seamlessness, where

you have never been wounded.

                                      

Landscape, Wu Yi

II.

The forces around us are not kind.

The impetus and spur—we need

something to push against

in order to grow.

Dawn goes up

and the twilight comes,

even in the roughest city place.

The outer presence

can be brought inward

as a sustaining thing.

When I think of beauty—

I think of people that cared for me

in bleak unsheltered times;

I think of those unknown people

on the frontiers of awful want

who manage somehow to go

beyond the given impoverishments

to offer gifts of possibility and

imagination and

seeing.

And they are able to sustain it,

holding the humane tissue alive,

because of beauty in them that

knows the horizon we are called to.

Kalon, kalein; the Greek root

for the word beauty is related

to the word for calling—it means

in the presence of beauty.

It’s not a neutral thing.

It’s actually calling you.

The heart of creativity—

this calling forth—

being called to be yourself and

called to transfigure what has

hardened or got wounded within you—

you’re suddenly

surprised.

If you can glimpse sideways

you can endure great bleakness.

You hear it in the music;

even in the fast and the light music.

You hear the undertones and the

quiet spaces where the echo of

this hauntedness comes through.

Friends of mine, when they play,

they’re in another place. They’re

serving the music.

I went to a Tchaikovsky concert

and I said, My god, I’m too near.

But then I knew why I was two rows in

the front: this beautiful violinist in her debut

was playing a Stradivarius from 1727.

You could almost see the music hurting her

even when she wasn’t playing.

Everyone was touched—

there were hardened critics there—

and people spontaneously stood up,

and she just held it.

And I cried.

An event had happened.

Even in landscapes of

corrugated control,

You can be swept

off your feet.

Autumn Mountains, Li Huayi

III.

The solid ground we’re on

is so tentative; even mountains

are suspended on strings.

How we cross the line that

separates two territories is key.

Fifty things to do in the middle of your busy

life and you get a phone call that somebody you

love is suddenly dying. Takes ten seconds to
communicate, but when you put the phone down, 
you’re already standing in a different world.

We are missing these thresholds.

In our culture there are no rituals

to help us to cross them worthily,

to separate the grain from the husk.

There is loneliness here

covered over by this fake language of 
intimacy you meet everywhere.

Stand back and see:

that spirit and soul dimensions are not

luxury items; they are the very origins,

the sources which enable everything

to flow and unfold in a new way.

Seeing is birth: the invisible world

can be released and excavated for areas

of ourselves we’ve forgotten.

At night when the forest is quiet,

these animals come to the water to drink.

When everything else has calmed,

beauty can somehow overtake you.

The visible world is the first shoreline

of the invisible world. Being is always

there, and we’re neck-deep in it.

The little splinter, the fragment that doesn’t

belong—that opening to the eternal in us

means we’re always trying to get home.

It means that when you change time levels,

something can transform quick. There are huge

gestations and fermentations going on in us

that we’re not even aware of. And then, we come

to a threshold—crossing over to become different—

because secret work has been done in us.

Step back and see:

who are those that truly see me?

We reawaken each other.

Beauty is not a luxury;

it’s the exciting question,

once you awaken to

the presence of God.

Then you are on a real safari with

the wildness and danger and otherness

of God. This idea of intimacy: true belonging,

being seen, the ultimate home of individuation—

the art of homecoming.

Your whole heart wakens up.

The glory of God is you fully alive.

Beauty is about becoming.

When we cross

a new threshold worthily,

patterns of repetition

that had us caught somewhere

heal. We cross on to new ground;

a kind of homecoming 
for the enriched memory 

of your unfolding life.

Where are you stretching your own boundaries?

When is the last time you had a great conversation?

When is the last time you overheard yourself saying

things that you never knew you knew? That you heard

yourself receiving words that found places within you

that you thought you had lost? A conversation that

continued to sing in your mind?

I’d say to anybody who’s listening,

who is maybe being coaxed a little away from

believing it’s all a naïve, doomed, illusion-ridden thing:

You can be surprised.

What a homecoming

it could become.