MASTERMIND: John O'Donohue

John O'Donohue was an Irish poet and philosopher who lived in a small cottage in the West of Ireland. He wrote several books including Anam Cara: The Book of Celtic Wisdom and Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong. John passed away on January 3, 2008. He was 52 years old. You can access his website to learn more about John and his work.

John appeared in the 2004 Masters Forum. He spoke of many deep and important things. Some are noted here.

On the Importance of Approaching Others
"One of the nice dimensions of Celtic thinking was that significant occasions or encounters should be appropriately framed. In our times, one of the things that we’re exceptionally coarse and vulgar at is the art of approaching. We have lost all sense of the reverence of approach, and many very significant things decide, I believe, not to approach us because our approach lacks expectation, appropriateness, and reverence."

On the Spirit of Approaching Others -
Beannacht: A Blessing
"On the day when the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the gray window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to waken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the curach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
and the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life."

On Wholesomeness
"The heart of the talk I want to give this morning is about wholesomeness. And the axiom is really that to awaken wholesomeness is to become fully alive, and that in turn animates all those around you. And it seems to me that the imagination is the human faculty that has a priority of loyalty to wholesomeness. Your mind splits things all the time. The mind and the understanding can’t bring together things that have been split apart, but the imagination actually can. And when your imagination comes alive, you begin to enter into your own wholesomeness."

On Imagination
“No matter how much we might deny it in the daylight world, each of us lives from our imagination. So the only difficulty, then, is in awakening the imagination, and an awakened imagination gives you entry to an enriched world of possibility. Because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is available and active and ready to be awakened."

"It’s interesting to look back along your life and ask yourself, 'What happened to the lives I had before me once but that I didn’t choose? Where do they actually live?' One of my theories is that in some secret way your unchosen lives live themselves out, and that maybe death only comes to us, not alone when we have completed the visible life that we think we have, but that somehow the other, unchosen lives have also come to fulfillment. But that’s the magic of the imagination; the imagination can go from the facts down into the matrix of deeper possibility."

On Imagination and Leadership
"In terms of leadership, that’s what’s absolutely necessary, because a leader that doesn’t have imagination and doesn’t have access to that world of possibility always gets stuck on the surface of a given situation, whereas the leader is one who has a vision and can always see the unattended-to possibilities in a situation. Always we tend to equate the limit with the limits of what’s possible, but it never is. If you could look at limits in a creative way, the limit would always be the invitation to the beyond that you don’t know yet."

On the Qualities of a Leader

• The first quality that I would like is that a leader would have an inner life – the person wouldn’t be just an outside, external functionary.

• Secondly, they would have a quality of vulnerability. I don’t mean vulnerability in the sense that they are assailable from every corner, but when you’d look in their eyes, you would know that they knew what it was like to be vulnerable.

• A third thing I like a leader to have is a bit of solitude, a very rare thing in our times. It’s hard to find it, and a lot of people are terrified of it, and they’ll run from it, but a person that can’t endure their own demons or know them, or have a secret place where they can meet them, can’t be trusted fully in the interaction of combat, where power is the question.

• A fourth thing I like in a leader is imagination and vision. Vision is vital. A vision is something that links together the gift of your own individuality with the need that is where you are, it links gift and hunger together in a way that links the best in you toward the best in them. Vision can only be developed if you are awake to the blessings and the potential of their own mind.

• Fifth, a leader has to have character. A person who has character is someone who is not a prisoner of their own ego and limitations.

• Sixth, a leader is someone who has the gift of compassion as well as the ministry of encouragement . . . It’s amazing when you think of some of the gifts and abilities that you have, if you hadn’t got that old praise or recognition or encouragement, you might never have crossed over into your own gift.

• The last thing I think a leader should have is the quality of listening. Heidegger said that true listening is worship, and it’s amazing, actually. It’s amazing to be listened to. When you’re truly listened to, a burden and all kinds of old false layering falls away from you completely.

On Birth, the Feminine and Creativity -
Nativity
No man reaches where the moon touches a woman.
Even the moon leaves her when she opens
Deeper into the ripple in her womb
That encircles dark, to become flesh and bone.

Someone is coming ashore inside her,
A face deciphers itself from water,
And she curves around the gathering wave,
Opening to offer the life it craves.

In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers,
She falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.
A red wire of pain feeds through every vein,
Until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.

Outside each other now, she sees him first,
Flesh of her flesh, her dreamt son safe on earth.

A Page of Lost Questions

• Is there someone walking home this evening through the streets of Leningrad that you have never met and never will meet, but whose life has had an incredible interest on yours?
• At the angel bar, what stories does your one tell about you?
• Supposing you were to take your heart away on your own for a day out, and that you really decided to listen to your heart, what do you think your heart would say to you?
• If you were in a conversation with your heart, and you told it how actually, factually short your life is, what would your heart make you stop from doing right now?

On Friendship
"Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition. ...in the moment of friendship, two souls suddenly recognize each other. It could be a meeting on the street, or at a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is the flash of recognition and the embers of kinship grow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing."

"We are not as near each other as we would like to imagine. Words create the bridges between us. Without them we would be lost islands. Affection, recognition and understanding travel across these fragile bridges and enable us to discover each other and awaken friendship and intimacy. Words are never just words. The range and depth of a person's soul is inevitably revealed in the quality of words she uses. When chosen with reverence and care, words not only describe what they say but also suggest what can never be said."

On Fear and Truth
"The opposite of fear is truth. And always at the heart of a fear, if you sit down with it and give it a chance to meet you and talk to you, you’ll find a truth that you’re trying to avoid. And when you enter into that level of conversation, what you’re doing is you’re trusting the wholesomeness of yourself to be able to go through this door of fear, not into destruction, but actually into a possibility that you would never otherwise have entered."

On Identity
"Identity is being reduced to biography, whereas in actual fact identity is a far more sublime, substantial, and sophisticated concept. Meister Eckhart says, 'There’s a place in your soul that neither time nor space not no creator’s thing has ever touched.' There’s a place inside you where no one has ever got to you, where no one has ever damaged you, where you have a niche of tranquility and natural serenity, and a courage and a hope that can never be taken from you. And I think that the intention of prayer, creativity, and true leadership is to somehow bring you into that place within you. This is summarized wonderfully in four lines by William Stafford in a poem from his book, Crossing Unmarked Snow:

"The things you do not have to say, make you rich.
Saying the things you do not have to say, weakens your talk.
Hearing the things you do not need to hear, dulls your hearing.
The things you know before you hear them, these are you and this is the reason that you are in the world."

From CMED Institute
A Presentation at Entering the Castle Workshop by John O'Donohue (Video)

From American Public Broadcasting
The Landscape of Inner Beauty: John O'Donohue Resources Page (Audio, Interviews & More)

A Reading of Beannacht by John O'Donohue (Slide Show)

From Harper Collins
A Reading Guide to Anam Cara

A Reading Guide to Eternal Echoes

From Personal Transformations
The Presence of Compassion: An Interview with John O’Donohue by Mary NurrieStearns