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To support the development of this site and the work of soul friendship you are invited to express your appreciation through the spiritual practice of Dana

   John O'Donohue - Mo Anam cara 
– My Soul Friend

Ireland has gained many things in recent years and lost others.  One of her greatest losses was the poet and scholar John O'Donohue who died all to young at the age of 53.  

This Irish storyteller and Anam cara never met with John O'Donohue but he is for me a soul friend who continues to accompany me on my spiritual journey in time and space and form.  John wrote in his world classic book Anam cara – Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World.  

“When you had an Anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention, morality and category.  You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul.  The Celtic understanding did not set limitations of space or time on the soul.  There is no cage for the soul.  The soul is a divine light that flows into you and into the Other.”

John O'Donohue is still such a flow of Divine light sharing invitations and blessings beyond the limitations of time and space.  He is still engaged with what the modern Celtic mystic Tom Cowan refers to as geancannach – (love talk).

John O'Donohue was a great talker but his talking was always the poetry of communion.  A friend of mine who did meet with this man said, “ You know Tony, he could hold you enthralled for and hour over one word.”

In an interview for New Dimensions Radio (changing the world one broadcast at a time) he laments the focus on out sound bite culture.  We are, as John O'Donohue says talking more and more and saying less and less.  There is little invitation to geancannach.  I personally witness this on what has become the latest fashion on the web.  This is the phenomenon called social networking.

John O'Donohue, via his writing, helped me through times when I really needed a friend of the soul.  This was when I returned to Ireland after some thirty years when my beloved sister Mary died.  It was a time when, both literally and metaphorically speaking, I was hit by a truck.  In reality I was lucky to survive but survive I did.

I survived to walk the quiet lanes around our cottage in the West of Ireland in Co. Cavan.  Like John O'Donohue I too am graced to live near a Burren.  This is the Cavan Burren.  It is a place set apart were only poets go and the odd hiker.  For me this place apart has become and remains a high place of sanctuary and sacredness.  

More often than not John O'Donohue would accompany me.  He would be with me in spirit.  Under my arm I would tuck his book of soul friendship entitled Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World .  Or it would be a little book of poetry entitled Conamara Blues: A Collection of Poetry.

Now, some years later, since my return I have many soul friends far beyond the shores of Ireland and far beyond the shores of time. These are friends such as W. B. Yeats, Rumi, Hafiz and others who are all beautiful invitations to soul friendship.

Most everyday I write a blog for The Anam cara Experience blog.  This has become a form of spiritual practice.  Most days, I take a short passage from the writings of John O'Donohue and I make it a meditation.  Throughout the weekly ezine The Anam cara Experience (available FREE at this site - see top right) you will find reflections on the radiance that flowed from the pen and heart of what was John O'Donohue in form.  A man who really was informed. 

For this writer he is still a flow.  He and I are still joined in an eternal way.  This is because the perfume of Divine Beauty that emanated in and through him is still fragrant in his writings.  Such writing is timeless.  It is the language of Tir Na Nog – the Land of the Forever Young.  It comes through a heart that was in love with the Celtic mind and was a radiance of the One Mind. 

John O'Donohue's writings transcended religious affiliation.  The Anam cara is attuned to your soul and not to your religious persuasion.  Although John was one of the greatest of orators he was a man whose words arose from of a deep knowing of the power of silence.  He and I are alike in this way.  Each of us would be thought great talkers but we would each claim that such conversation arises from our connection to the beauty of no thing.

Deepak Chopra, best selling author of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Pocketbook Guide to Fulfilling Your Dreams (One Hour of Wisdom) , writes of John O'Donohue's writings  

"Anam cara is a rare synthesis of philosophy, poetry and spirituality.  This work will have a powerful and life transforming experience for those who read it. The writings and the talks by John O'Donohue can be read and listened to again and again. They are spiritual gemstones reflecting the light of a soul connected to the Invisible Embrace that is the beauty of the Divine."

While today our politicians and business leaders are tearing out the heart of Irelands spiritual heritage to make way for a motorway the heart of what it really means to be connected to the ancient world and the ever new world of the soul will remain.  This will be because of such Irish Blessing as John O'Donohue in whose writings such invitations will always remain.

Energy never dies.  It changes form.  It changes form into higher and higher experiences of becoming Love in form.  The thoughts and writings of John O'Donohue will remain.  They will call us from Tir Na Nog the Land of the Forever Young as invitations to the beauty of the friendship with the soul.  This invitation has always been and will always be.

It takes a great soul to articulate this invitation.  Few people, to this writers mind, did this as well as the John O'Donohue.  He had one of the greatest teachers of soul who ever walked this earth.  This was the German Christian mystic Meister Eckhart.  I imagine them now conversing long about Love.

I leave you with a poem that is included in Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World Anam cara – Spiritual Wisdom of the Celtic World.  This is a poem that this writer knows by heart.  It is a poem that reminds us, as did John O'Donohue that death is not the end; it is a rebirth.

Presents

I give you emptiness

I give you plenitude,

unwrap them carefully –

One’s as fragile as the other –

and when you thank me

I’ll pretend to notice the doubt in your voice

when you say they’re just what you wanted.

Put them on the table by your bed.

When you wake in the morning

they’ll have gone through the door of sleep

into your head.  Wherever you go

they’ll go with you and

wherever you are you’ll wonder,

smiling about the fullness

you can’t add to and the emptiness

that you can fill.

Norman MacCaig.

Ireland and the wider world will, for a time, mourn the loss of one of her best sons.  Only what he left us of his writings is a great grace and a great invitation from a great soul.  All his writings are great Irish Blessings and will remain such beyond time and space and within time and space.  I will miss him, one who truly was and is a soul friend – mo Anam cara.

©  Tony Cuckson 2008

Another Soul Friend

"click on graphic below"

W. B. Yeats was connected to the fairy people. These people are called the Tuatha de Danaan. – The Shining Ones.  These are the people in Irish mythology who were driven underground. This is a metaphor for the fact – and it sadly is a fact for most of us – that beauty within is driven underground.  This is why today you have the cult worship of celebrity in television, magazines and newspapers. All this is the projection outward of the refusal to be the ‘celebratory’ we are each called to be.