I had to get out of the house yesterday afternoon, so I walked the dirt roads near our house and listened to Speaking of Faith’s September 17, 2009 podcast “The Inner Landscape of Beauty.”  [Click on the interview title to read the entire interview.]  Krista Tippett’s guest was Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, author of Anam Ċara, Gaelic for “soul friend,” in one of his last interviews before his death in 2008.

So much of the conversation was good, but here, I highlight a few things that touched me deeply in some way.

I guessing, but I think each one of us has been wounded in some way during our lives, and often times we cling to that scar of hurt, as though it defines us, identifies us.  As though we are that person.

But we’re going about it all wrong.

O’Donohue: “Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you, and I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”

What a beautiful way of stating it, don’t you think?

Tippett asked O’Donohue if he felt that it was harder to love in today’s world, or if the details were just different.  She asked, “In everyone’s life there is great need for an anam ċara, a soul friend.  In this love you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. Where you are understood, you are at home.”

And O’Donohue responded (italics mine): “I don’t think we’re less capable at all. I think we’re more unpracticed at it and therefore more desperate for it. And I think it’s a matter of attention really, just attention. That if you realize how vital to your whole spirit — and being and character and mind and health — friendship actually is, you will take time for it, you know? And the trouble is though for so many of us is that we have to be in trouble before we remember what’s essential. And sometimes it’s one of the lonelinesses of humans is that you hold on desperately to things that make you miserable and that sometimes you only realize what you have when you’re almost about to lose it.”

Beauty can be found in friendship and love.  Beauty can be found all around us, if we’re looking.

“The human soul does not merely hunger for beauty, John O’Donohue believed, we feel most alive in the presence of what is beautiful. It returns us often in fleeting but sustaining moments, he said, to our highest selves. And a neglect of beauty, he believed, is at the heart of our deepest modern crisis.”

O’Donohue: “I think that beauty is not a luxury, but I think that it ennobles the heart and reminds us of the infinity that is within us. I always loved what Mandela said when he came out, and I was actually in his cell in Robben Island, one time I was in South Africa. Even after 27 years in confinement for something he never — for wrong you never committed, he turned himself into a huge priest and come out with this sentence where he said, “You know that what we are afraid of is not so much our limitations but the infinite within us.” And I think that is in everybody. And I suppose the question that’s at the heart of all we’ve been discussing really, which is a beautiful question, is the question of God, you know?

“And I think that one of the reasons that so many people turn away from religion in our times is that the God question has died for them, because the question has been framed in such repetitive dead language. And I think it’s the exciting question, once you awaken to the presence of God.”

Such exact phrasing, and I think it’s true.  We’ve not found God in our own lives, in the every day corners of them.  We’ve only heard and believed things told to us, in a foreign, obtuse language.  We need a new and original language, meant to inspire and uplift.  Something that speaks to us as individuals.

But how do we pursue beauty when not much around us is what we would think of as beautiful?

O’Donohue: “…you know it’s like in old notions of growth and development there was always this idea, as Noel Hanlon — poet friend of mine — says, you know, in a poem about her daughter, “Like me you needed something to push against” — that somehow we needed something to push against in order to grow. Now there is almost a feeling like as that growth should be delivered to us. And I think that from the way you state it is that it’s a recognition. That there is this dialectic there, that around us the forces are not kind in terms of either recognizing, awakening, or encouraging beauty, but that actually, they should be the impetus and spur to do it. Now how do we do it?

“One way, and I think this is a really lovely way, and I think it’s an interesting question to ask one self too, you know? And the question is when is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture. But when had you last a great conversation, in which you over heard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew. That you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you on to a different plane. And then fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards, you know? And I’ve — I’ve had some of them recently, and it’s just absolutely amazing, like, as we would say at home, they are food and drink for the soul, you know?

“Second thing, I think a question to always, ask oneself, who are you reading? Who are you reading? And where are you stretching your own boundaries? Are you repetitive in that? And you know, one of the first books I read as a child — we had no books at home, but a neighbor of ours had all these books and he brought loads of books, that’s how I ruined my eyes and I have to wear glasses. But one of the first books I read was a book by Willie Sutton, the bank robber, who was doing 30 years for robbing banks. And in the book somebody asked Willie, and they said, ‘Willie why do you rob banks?’ And Willie said, ”’Cause that’s where the money is.’ And you know, why do we read books, ’cause that’s where the wisdom is. So like, my professors in colleges always use to say, you know, if you were doing an essay or doing a thesis, you know, the first thing you have to do is read the primary sources and trust your own encounter with them before you go to the secondary literature. And I’d say to anybody who is listening to us, who is interested in spirituality and who is maybe being coaxed a little away from believing it’s all a naïve, doomed, illusion-ridden thing, pick up some thing like Meister Eckhart or some one of the mystics and just have a look at it, and you can be surprised what an exciting adventure and homecoming it could become.”

Beauty is our calling.  It is “food and drink for the soul.”

“Push against” something–call a friend, write a note, have a conversation, read a book.  Find the beauty in your world.  You need it for survival, and not only survival, but (and I’m searching for the right word here…) fulfillment…enjoyment.

For me, beauty is (and this is a short list): tulips, peonies, the sun coming up over the treetops, the gold shorn stalks of corn in the late afternoons, unusual cloud formations, the hum of a dragonfly or buzz of a bee, a lovely conversation with a friend, writing snail mail notes, baking for someone else, creating holiday and otherwise traditions, surprising someone with an I-love-you gift, a book/movie/canvas/sculpture/performance I can’t stop thinking about, Vivaldi’s Gloria, loving a child who might not otherwise have received much love in her lifetime, my relationship with my husband, the hard work of life (did that startle you?), the ability to ask questions, the joy in befriending other open-minded people, garnering ideas from myriads of creative bloggers, creating a home for my family.

How do you fill your life with beauty?

[Post image: Sybil Head Dingle Peninsula in Ireland]