The Sanctuary of a Favourite Place
To awaken a sense of our ancient longing for Nature can help us to anchor our longing. When we go out alone and enter its solitude, we return home to our souls. When you find a place in Nature where the mind and heart find rest, then you have discovered a sanctuary for your soul. The landscape of the West of Ireland offers welcoming shelter to the soul. You can go to places in the limestone mountains where you are above the modern world; you will see nothing from the twenty centuries. There is only the subtle sculpture that rain and wind have indented on the stone. When the light comes out, the stone turns white, and you remember that this is living stone from the floor of an ancient ocean. Your eye notices how the fossils were locked into its solidification. Some of the stone, particularly at the edges, is serrated and shattered. In other places, the long limestone pavement is as pure and clear as if it had just been minted. Swept clean by the wind, these pavements are smooth and certain. The eye is surprised at the still clusters of white, red, and yellow flowers amidst the applause of rock. Moments of absolute blue startle the eye from the nests of gentian. Purple orchids sway elegantly in the breeze. Over the edge of the mountain, you can hear the chorus of the ocean. Its faithful music has never abandoned this stone world that once lived beneath its waters. Perhaps Nature senses the longing that is in us, the restlessness that never lets us settle. She takes us into the tranquillity of her stillness if we visit her. We slip into her quiet contemplation and inhabit for a while the depth of her ancient belonging. Somehow we seem to become one with the rhythm of the universe. Our longing is purified, and we gain strength to come back to life refreshed and to refine our ways of belonging in the world. Nature calls us to tranquillity and rhythm. When your heart is confused or heavy, a day outside in Nature’s quiet eternity restores your lost tranquillity.
The Longing of the Earth
There is an ancient faithfulness in Nature. Mountains, fields, and shorelines are still to be found in the same places after thousands of years. Landscape is alive in such a dignified and reserved way. It can keep its memories and dreams to itself. Landscape lives the contemplative life of silence, solitude, and stillness. It carries and holds its depths of darkness and lonesomeness with such perfect equanimity. It never falls out of its native rhythm. Rains come with intensity and surprise. Winds rise and keen like lost children, and grow still. Seasons build and emerge with such sure completion, and give way. Yet Nature never loses its sense of sequence. Tides clear the shore and seem to push the sea out, then turn and with great excitement adorn the shore with blue again. Dawn and dusk frame our time here in sure circles. Landscape is at once self-sufficient and hospitable; we are not always worthy guests.
Though its belonging is still and sure, there is also a sense in which Nature is trapped in the one place. This must intensify the longing at the heart of Nature. A little bird alights and fidgets for a minute on a massive rock that was left behind in the corner of this field by the ice thousands of years ago. The miracle of flight is utter freedom for the bird; it can follow its longing anywhere. The stillness of the stone is pure, but it also means that it can never move one inch from its thousand-year stand. It enjoys absolute belonging, but if it longs to move, it can only dream of the return of the ice. Perhaps the stone’s sense of time has the patience of eternity. There is a pathos of stillness in Nature. Yet all of us, its children, are relentlessly moved by longing; we can never enter the innocence of its belonging. Where can we behold Nature’s longing? All we see of Nature is surface. The beauty she sends to the surface could only come from the creativity of great and noble longing. The arrival of spring is a miracle of the richest colour. Yet we always seem to forget that all of these beautiful colours have been born in darkness. The dark earth is the well out of which colour flows. Think of the patience of trees: year after year stretching up to the light, keeping a life-line open between the dark night of the clay and the blue shimmer of the heavens. Think of the beautiful, high contours of mountains lifting up the earth, the music of streams, and the fluent travel of rivers linking the stolid silence of land masses with the choruses of the ocean. Think of animals who carry in their dignity and simplicity of presence such refined longing. Think of your self and feel how you belong so deeply to the earth and how you are a tower of longing in which Nature rises up and comes to voice. We are the children of the clay, who have been released so that the earth may dance in the light.
The great Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty was born in Gort nag Capall in Inis Mor in Aran. He left there as a young man and had never returned. Shortly before he died, he returned to that little village. A lifetime of changes had occurred, most of those he once knew were now dead. On his way into the village, he saw the big rock which had been there for thousands of years. O’Flaherty hit the old stone with his walking stick and said, “A Chloich mhóir athním tusa,” i.e., O great stone I recognize you. In silence and stillness, the stone held the memory of the village. Stone is the tabernacle of memory. Until we allow some of Nature’s stillness to reclaim us, we will remain victims of the instant and never enter the heritage of our ancient belonging.
Our Longing to Know
When we emerged from the earth, not only were we given a unique inner well, but we were also given a mirror in our minds. This mirror is fractured, but it enables us to think about every thing. Our thoughts can gather and ask themselves questions and probe mysteries until some new light is quarried. Because you are human, you are privileged and burdened with the task of knowing. Our desire to know is the deepest longing of the soul; it is a call to intimacy and belonging. We are always in a state of knowing, even when we do not realize it. Though the most subtle minds in the Western tradition have attempted to understand what it is that happens when we know something, no one has succeeded in explaining how we know. When we know something, we come into relationship with it. All our knowing is an attempt to transfigure the unknown—to complete the journey from anonymity to intimacy. Since each one of us lives behind the intimacy of a countenance, we long to put a personal countenance on our experiences. When we know what has happened to us, we will come closer to ourselves and learn more about who we are. Yet the world is not our mirror image. Knowledge, including the knowledge we have of each other, does not abolish the strangeness. True knowledge makes us aware of the numinous and awakens desire.
Aristotle said in the first sentence of his Metaphysics, “All men by nature desire to know.” This is the secret magic and danger of having a mind. Even though your body is always bound to one place, your mind is a relentless voyager. The mind has a magnificent, creative restlessness that always brings it on a new journey. Even in the most sensible and controlled lives there is often an undertow of longing that would deliver them to distant shores. There is something within you that is not content to remain fixed within any one frame. You cannot immunize yourself against your longing. You love to reach beyond, to discover something new. Knowing calls you out of yourself. Discovery delights the heart. This is the natural joy of childhood and the earned joy of the artist. The child and the artist are pilgrims of discovery. When you limit your life to the one frame of thinking, you close out the mystery. When you fence in the desires of your heart within fixed walls of belief, morality, and convention, you dishonour the call to discovery. You create grey fields of “quiet desperation.” Discovery is the nature of the soul. There is some wildness of divinity in us, calling us to live everything. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh said, “To be dead is to stop believing in / The masterpieces we will begin tomorrow.”