Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

In chapter 4, we will reflect on work as a poetics of growth. The invisible hungers to become visible, to express itself in our actions. This is the inner desire of work. When our inner life can befriend the outer world of work, new imagination is awakened and great changes take place. In chapter 5, we will contemplate our friendship with the harvest time of life, old age. We will explore memory as the place where our vanished days secretly gather and acknowledge that the passionate heart never ages. Time is veiled eternity. In chapter 6, we will probe our necessary friendship with our original and ultimate companion, death. We will reflect on death as the invisible companion who walks the road of life with us from birth. Death is the great wound in the universe, the root of all fear and negativity. Friendship with our death enables us to celebrate the eternity of the soul, which death cannot touch.

The Celtic imagination loved the circle. It recognized how the rhythm of experience, nature, and divinity followed a circular pattern. In acknowledgment of this, the structure of this book follows a circular rhythm. It begins with a treatment of friendship as awakening, then explores the senses as immediate and creative thresholds. This builds the ground for a positive evaluation of solitude, which in turn seeks expression in the external world of work and action. As our outer energy diminishes, we are faced with the task of aging and dying. This structure follows the circle of life as it spirals toward death and attempts to illuminate the profound invitation it offers.

These chapters circle around a hidden, silent seventh chapter, which embraces the ancient namelessness at the heart of the human self. Here resides the unsayable, the ineffable. In essence, this book attempts a phenomenology of friendship in a lyrical-speculative form. It takes its inspiration from the implied and lyrical metaphysics of Celtic spirituality. Rather than being a piecemeal analysis of Celtic data, it attempts a somewhat broader reflection, an inner conversation with the Celtic imagination, endeavoring to thematize its implied philosophy and spirituality of friendship.

ONETHE MYSTERY OF FRIENDSHIP

LIGHT IS GENEROUS

If you have ever had occasion to be out early in the morning before the dawn breaks, you will have noticed that the darkest time of night is immediately before dawn. The darkness deepens and becomes more anonymous. If you had never been to the world and never known what a day was, you couldn’t possibly imagine how the darkness breaks, how the mystery and color of a new day arrive. Light is incredibly generous, but also gentle. When you attend to the way the dawn comes, you learn how light can coax the dark. The first fingers of light appear on the horizon, and ever so deftly and gradually, they pull the mantle of darkness away from the world. Quietly before you is the mystery of a new dawn, the new day. Emerson said, “No one suspects the days to be Gods.” It is one of the tragedies of modern culture that we have lost touch with these primal thresholds of nature. The urbanization of modern life has succeeded in exiling us from this fecund kinship with our mother earth. Fashioned from the earth, we are souls in clay form. We need to remain in rhythm with our inner clay voice and longing. Yet this voice is no longer audible in the modern world. We are not even aware of our loss, consequently, the pain of our spiritual exile is more intense in being largely unintelligible.

The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb-time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night. The dawn is a refreshing time, a time of possibility and promise. All the elements of nature—stones, fields, rivers, and animals—are suddenly there anew in the fresh dawn light. Just as darkness brings rest and release, so the dawn brings awakening and renewal. In our mediocrity and distraction, we forget that we are privileged to live in a wondrous universe. Each day, the dawn unveils the mystery of this universe. Dawn is the ultimate surprise; it awakens us to the immense “thereness” of nature. The wonderful subtle color of the universe arises to clothe everything. This is captured in a phrase from William Blake: “Colours are the wounds of light.” Colors bring out the depth of secret presence at the heart of nature.

THE CELTIC CIRCLE OF BELONGING