FOCUS: St. Patrick's Day

Irish Blessings
"May the Lord keep you in His hand, and never close His fist too tight."

"May you have warm words on a cold evening, a full moon on a dark night, and a smooth road all the way to your door."

"May you always have walls for the winds, a roof for the rain, tea beside the fire, laughter to cheer you, those you love near you, and all your heart might desire."

"May the road rise to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, the rains fall soft upon your fields, and, until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand."

An Irish Curse
"May the curse of Mary Malone and her nine blind illegitimate children chase you so far over the hills of Damnation that the Lord himself can't find you with a telescope."

Irish Proverbs
"Don't be breaking your shin on a stool that's not in your way."

"You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was."

"Better fifty enemies outside the house than one within."

"It is easy to halve the potato where there's love."

"It's no delay to stop to edge the tool."

"It’s no use going to the goat's house to look for wool."

"Snuff at a wake is fine if there's nobody sneezing over the snuff box."

"Though honey is sweet, do not lick it off a briar."

"Everyone lays a burden on the willing horse."

"Never scald your lips with another man's porridge."

"You'll never plough a field by turning it over in your mind."

"You must cut your coat according to your cloth."

"Your son is your son until he marries, but your daughter is your daughter until you die."

"You are not a fully fledged sailor unless you have sailed under full sail, and you have not built a wall unless you have rounded a corner."

"'Tis better to buy a small bouquet and give to your friend this very day, than a bushel of roses white and red to lay on his coffin after he's dead."

Irish Toasts
"Here's to a long life and a merry one. A quick death and an easy one. A pretty girl and an honest one. A cold beer-and another one!"

"Saint Patrick was a gentleman
Who through strategy and stealth
Drove all the snakes from Ireland
Here's a drinkee to his health!
But not too many drinkees
Lest we lose ourselves and then
Forget the good Saint Patrick
And see them snakes again!”

Paddy at the Pub
Paddy had been drinking at his local Dublin pub all day and most of the night celebrating St. Patrick's Day.

Mick, the bartender says, " You'll not be drinking anymore tonight Paddy."

Paddy replies, "OK Mick, I'll be on my way then."

Paddy spins around on his stool and steps off. He falls flat on his face. "Shoite," he says and pulls himself up by the stool and dusts himself off. He takes a step towards the door and falls flat on his face, "Shoite, Shoite!"

He looks to the doorway and thinks to himself that if he can just get to the door and some fresh air he'll be fine. He belly crawls to the door and shimmies up to the door frame. He sticks his head outside and takes a deep breath of fresh air, feels much better and takes a step out onto the sidewalk and falls flat on his face. "Bi'Jesus... I'm fockin' focked," he says.

He can see his house just a few doors down, and crawls to the door, hauls himself up the door frame, opens the door and shimmies inside. He takes a look up the stairs and says "No fockin' way."

He crawls up the stairs to his bedroom door and says "I can make it to the bed."

He takes a step into the room and falls flat on his face. He says "Fock it," and falls into bed.

The next morning, his wife, Jess, comes into the room carrying a cup of coffee and says, "Get up Paddy. Did you have a bit to drink last night?"

Paddy says, "I did Jess. I was fockin' pissed. But how'd you know?"

"Mick phoned. You left your wheelchair at the pub."

To Heaven
Father Murphy walks into a pub in Donegal, and says to the first man he meets, "Do you want to go to heaven?"

The man said, "I do Father."

The priest said, "Then stand over there against the wall."

Then the priest asked the second man, "Do you want to go to heaven?"

"Certainly, Father," was the man's reply.

"Then stand over there against the wall," said the priest.

Then Father Murphy walked up to O'Toole and said, "Do you want to go to heaven?"

O'Toole said, "No, I don't Father."

The priest said, "I don't believe this. You mean to tell me that when you die you don't want to go to heaven?"

O'Toole said, "Oh, when I die, yes, but I thought you were getting a group together to go right now."

Malachy McCourt, The Hypocrisy of St.Patrick's Day


Celtic Fans, You'll Never Walk Alone

FOCUS: The Addiction Abyss

Recovery & Redemption or Death
"When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when it's waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye." - Hunter S. Thompson

"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." - Jean Cocteau

"I am not being flippant when I say that all of us suffer from addiction. Nor am I reducing the meaning of addiction. I mean in all truth that the psychological, neurological, and spiritual dynamics of full-fledged addiction are actively at work within every human being. The same processes that are responsible for addiction to alcohol and narcotics are also responsible for addiction to ideas, work, relationships, power, moods, fantasies, and an endless variety of other things. We are all addicts in every sense of the word. Moreover, our addictions are our own worst enemies." - Gerald May, Addiction and Grace

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.” - Carl Jung

"From the first moment I looked into that horror on September 11, into that fireball, into that explosion of horror, I knew it. I recognized an old companion. I recognized religion." - Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete

"An Addict is an Addict. It doesn't matter whether the Addict is white, black, yellow or green, rich or poor or somewhere in the middle, the most famous Person on the Planet or the most unknown. It doesn't matter whether the addiction is drugs, alcohol, crime, sex, shopping, food, gambling, television, or the fucking Flintstones. The life of the Addict is always the same. There is no excitement, no glamour, no fun. There are no good times, there is no joy, there is no happiness. There is no future and no escape. There is only an obsession. To make light of it, brag about it, or revel in the mock glory of it is not in any way, shape or form related to its truth, and that is all that matters, the truth." - James Frey, A Million Little Pieces

"If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house." - Jean Cocteau

"I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise. In a way, being an addict is very proactive." - Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

"Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction." - Wm. Burroughs

"The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame.
He might get burned, but he's in the game.
And once he's in, he can't go back, he'll
Beat his wings 'til he burns them black...
No, The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. . .
The Moth don't care if The Flame is real,
'Cause Flame and Moth got a sweetheart deal.
And nothing fuels a good flirtation,
Like Need and Anger and Desperation...
No, The Moth don't care if The Flame is real. . . "
- Aimee Mann

"You cannot put a cheap band-aid on a sacred wound; there is no way through pain but to walk through it." - Robin Smith

"Coyote is always out there waiting, and Coyote is always hungry." - Native American Saying

William Cope Moyers, Broken


From FORA.tv
A Conversation with Andre Agassi: Reflections on Tennis, Addictions, and Life (Video)

From FORA.tv
David & Nic Sheff: A Father & Son's Journey in Addiction (Video)

From C-SPAN
Methland:The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding (Video)

From YouTube
A Young Woman's Story of Self-Injury (Video)

From The Los Angeles Times
The Heroin Road: Part One - A Lethal Business Model Targets Middle America by Sam Quinones

The Heroin Road: Part Two - Black Tar Moves in and Death Follows by Sam Quinones

The Heroin Road: Part Three: The Good Life in Xalisco Can Mean Death in the United States by Sam Quinones

Living on Black Tar Heroin (Slideshow)

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