The Portal
For the awakened imagination there is no such thing as inner poverty. John O’Donohue (essay The Celtic Imagination: Experience and the ‘Web of Betweenness’ in Beauty: The Invisible Embrace)
I returned to reading John O’Donohue’s brilliant, moving words this week, simply picking up the book and thumbing pages until sensing I was where I needed to be. I’d come to the reading time with no particular intention nor with a question in search of an answer. I came for nourishment, as his words never fail to feed this soul.
The essay I landed on and quoted above ends with this:
As in the rainforest, a dazzling diversity of life-forms complement and sustain each other; there is secret oxygen with which we unknowingly sustain one another. True community is not produced; it is invoked and awakened. True community is an ideal where the full identities of awakened and realized individuals challenge and complement each other. In this sense both individuality and originality enrich self and others.
Imagine we humans are that diverse and complementary rainforest. For a moment I think of the divisiveness I observe here in the place where I live as a micro to the countless conflicts beyond this sacred place.
Then O’Donohue’s words spark memory of a long held ideal, vision, belief that when we each discover and follow the path of our purpose, our passion, our gifts, we will experience healing of all that divides us. We will harmonize with one another naturally never by force as well as with all life and our beloved planet home, Gaia.
I reflect on the extent to which our current world falls far short of this imagined ideal and how, sadly, our systems are designed to create something far different than true community. Hence ‘community’ is not invoked or awakened in much of daily life. Nor is our true nature, yours and mine, called forth into expression. Rather our true selves and true community lie in wait as potentials that we’ll attend to ‘someday’. Someday when we have time. Someday when we can ‘afford’ it. Someday when …
Perhaps that is why we witness and experience so many systems failing. Perhaps those systems that have pitted us against one another in oh so many ways are calling forth our ‘someday’ in this moment, suggesting that for humanity survive, ‘someday’ is now. Perhaps fear and ‘winning’ at any cost, the highest ‘price’ being the peace of the soul from which our true essence can arise – individually and collectively – have run their course.
Our world – humanity and the planet - need our truest selves to attend them. Amidst the world’s chaos and breakdowns how might we put more attention on invoking our own true essence, that ‘secret oxygen’ with which we sustain not only one another, but first, ourselves for the sake of our wholeness?
The answer of course comes from deep within and we must first be willing to put our toes in the water, then dive into the deep well. While our journeys are unique and individual to each of us, they hold the potential for invoking true community in our world: world as diverse and complementary as the rainforest. Self as an integral part of that world. Self and world as life generating, life enhancing. Self and world as whole. The Heaven of our dreams manifest on Gaia.
Imagine …
Raven ‘Cawing’ Forth Magic in the Woods