Recognition

Mornings are such a special time.  Maybe it is because we have just emerged from that “more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began” as David Whyte says, and the veil is still thin.  Perhaps we haven’t had time yet to become fully desensitized to the promptings of the soul, and the noise of the world hasn’t quite drowned out its whisper.

I awoke before dawn recently, present to some vague unspoken sadness.  Linda was away and I was left to my own devices for the weekend.  I seated myself in the blue easy chair in our living room with my back to the windows and stared mindlessly at my laptop.  Bereft of inspiration or motivation I surfed the Internet in a familiar sort of stupor – no doubt an attempt to numb the low level subterranean grief that inhabited my body.

We Irish are a peculiar lot.  When it comes to grief I’m tempted to say that we have a corner on the market - but perhaps that’s too broad a stroke.  Still, as Yeats famously said “the Irish have an abiding sense of tragedy that sustains them through temporary periods of joy.”  To take this a bit further, I had a good laugh recently when I heard an Irishman say “whenever God closes one door He shuts another – and if He is really pissed He’ll slam your fingers in it.”  But most poignant for me are the words, again of David Whyte whose mother, Mary Theresa O Sullivan hailed from Waterford City.  He says:  “In an Irish telling, everything is ultimately experienced through terrible grief and loss.  It is the one left singing, and the flight of song, in the midst of that grief, that counts.” (From “Crossing the Unknown Sea.” P86.)

At some point I glanced up from my computer and saw a shaft of sunlight strike the wall opposite my chair.  Something moved in me and I got up and went to the window.  We live in a two level house that is built into the side of a hill facing east.  The living area is on the upper level and the windows, which extend the entire length of the house, look out over a lake and wetlands.  I sometimes feel like I’m living in a tree house.

Approaching the window a shock of surprise entered my body as I was greeted by the presence of the early morning sun sitting low in the sky.  The impact was sudden and powerful - as if a timely utterance issued forth from the heart of the world that said “Behold!”  At the same time a gust of wind blew some lightly powdered snow, newly fallen the night before, from its resting place on the branches just outside the window.  Like puffs of smoke it cascaded to the earth backlit by the slanting light.  I gazed mesmerized at the spectacle unfolding before my eyes.  It can be easy to lose sight of the particular amidst the flourish of the collective, but I found myself watching individual flakes on their descent. 

I stayed there for about twenty minutes with a mixture of awe, gratitude and deep sadness all present simultaneously.  It was as if something had been revealed or unconcealed; something that had been hidden or that I was blind to. I was alive.

I wonder if it is the shock of recognition that awakens us; the recognition of the soul of the Other – both the individual and the collective.  Perhaps we become present to a sort of coherence that may not be so much about our own life but rather the essential mystery at the core of all life that can only be recognized by our own soul.  In such moments sometimes all we can do is gasp, or cry, or scream, or sing, or dance because for an instant we touch the abyss and glimpse the eternal.  Perhaps this can help us to remember we have been chosen

and bring us back to our everyday world having fallen more deeply in love with the ordinary – with solid ground.

We were never meant to be alone – and we never are.  It is our engagement with the world that brings us alive – the others too.