Eternal Time
The Soul as Temple of Memory
Self-Compassion and the Art of Inner Harvesting
To Keep Something Beautiful in Your Heart
The Bright Field
The Passionate Heart Never Ages
The Fire of Longing
Aging: An Invitation to New Solitude
Loneliness: The Key to Courage
Wisdom as Poise and Grace
Old Age and the Twilight Treasures
Old Age and Freedom
6 Death: The Horizon Is in the Well
The Unknown Companion
The Faces of Death in Everyday Life
Death as the Root of Fear
Death in the Celtic Tradition
When Death Visits…
The Caoineadh: The Irish Mourning Tradition
The Soul That Kissed the Body
The Bean Sí
A Beautiful Death
The Dead Are Our Nearest Neighbors
The Ego and the Soul
Death as an Invitation to Freedom
Nothingness: A Face of Death
Waiting and Absence
Birth as Death
Death Transfigures Our Separation
Are Space and Time Different in the Eternal World?
The Dead Bless Us
Further Recommended Reading
About the Author
Other Books by John O’Donohue
Copyright
About the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Diane Reverand, my editor at HarperCollins, for her encouragement and help; Kim Witherspoon and her agency for her belief in my work and its effective mediation; Tami Simon and Michael Taft at Sounds True for their care and support, and Anne Minogue for introducing me; John Devitt, who read the manuscript and offered a thorough, creative, and literary critique; Marian O’Beirn, who read each draft of the manuscript, for her encouragement, invaluable editorial advice, and attention; David Whyte for his brotherly care and generosity; Ellen Wingard for her support and confidence in the work; and my family for all the ordinary magic and laughter! To the landscape and the ancestors; 
o mo 
áirde a 
ug fosca
agus solas.
PROLOGUE
IT IS STRANGE TO BE HERE. THE MYSTERY NEVER LEAVES YOU alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through the opening of the mouth, we bring out sounds from the mountain beneath the soul. These sounds are words. The world is full of words. There are so many talking all the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on television, on radio, in the paper, in books. The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us. We take each other’s sounds and make patterns, predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies. Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the world together. Yet the uttering of the word reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.
Humans are new here. Above us, the galaxies dance out toward infinity. Under our feet is ancient earth. We are beautifully molded from this clay. Yet the smallest stone is millions of years older than us. In your thoughts, the silent universe seeks echo.
An unknown world aspires toward reflection. Words are the oblique mirrors that hold your thoughts. You gaze into these word-mirrors and catch glimpses of meaning, belonging, and shelter. Behind their bright surfaces is the dark and the silence. Words are like the god Janus, they face outward and inward at once.
If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person, or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is to be natural, to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you. Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world.
Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace. Nowhere else is there such intimate and frightening access to the mysterium. Friendship is the sweet grace that liberates us to approach, recognize, and inhabit this adventure. This book is intended as an oblique mirror in which you might come to glimpse the presence and power of inner and outer friendship. Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe. The human journey is a continuous act of transfiguration. If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negative, and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us. As an artist, the human person is permanently active in this revelation. The imagination is the great friend of the unknown. Endlessly, it invokes and releases the power of possibility. Friendship, then, is not to be reduced to an exclusive or sentimental relationship; it is a far more extensive and intensive force.
The Celtic mind was neither discursive nor systematic. Yet in their lyrical speculation the Celts brought the sublime unity of life and experience to expression. The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together. The Celtic imagination articulates the inner friendship that embraces Nature, divinity, underworld, and human world as one. The dualism that separates the visible from the invisible, time from eternity, the human from the divine, was totally alien to them. Their sense of ontological friendship yielded a world of experience imbued with a rich texture of otherness, ambivalence, symbolism, and imagination. For our sore and tormented separation, the possibility of this imaginative and unifying friendship is the Celtic gift.
The Celtic understanding of friendship finds its inspiration and culmination in the sublime notion of the anam ara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul; ara is the word for friend. So anam ara means soul friend. The anam ara was a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam