The word if as it is often used is such an unfaithful word, for it implies non-acceptance of what is. The word now, on the other hand, contains the hint of the Mysterium, the moment, now, already gone, for now is essentially not. Now is the cracked word that can leave us so fragile; how difficult it is to remain open when seen and not to defend oneself when exposed to the light of truth.
The great Russian novelists used their words in a historical setting to try to record the human condition. In contrast, the Celtic Irish were drawn to the endless spirals of the Word itself, the Word storied, unknowing in the circular world of mythology, embracing their themes of other worlds, loss and recovery, leaving and returning. Maybe that is why na fili, the poets, were held in such high esteem. Their language came closest to what St. John of the Cross referred to as the Nada, the Nothingness wherein is the all and everything.
So much reincarnates into and is shaped in childhood, including language. Standing once in a field in my own uninitiated youth, I felt for a whispering moment that I was as old as I was ever going to be; within was the knowing of something essentially important but also the realization that I had forgotten what was known. The years since my departure from that ancient land with its deserts and eucalyptus forests were involved locating and redeeming that hollowed, stunted youth. So much of what passes for education and child rearing is a violation of our inherent, unscripted wish to become whole and to be in place to receive the Word as it becomes flesh.
There is this Memory... yearning to be remembered. We carry within us unfinished memories. Their redemption lies within, living in the paradoxical space between past and future, above and below.
Now on this mountain the sorrowful path reopens, trees are silent in the waves of light, and on the earthly mountain path my steps through the body organically formed are tracing through echoing ancestors whose manifestation is drawn like fluctuating shadows in a forested, moonlit night.
Up in this high country, in a house of cuardí, I first heard the singing of Sean Nós, a singing ancient and so embodied in complexity of modulation and intonation that I instinctively understood it conveyed the passions of life. Not the subsistence that so many have come to associate with that word, but life that had so bared itself to vulnerability that it knew how to die without fear. Its sound came as a shock, disturbing my inner ghosts and leaving me with a feeling of awe. Years went fumbling by before I could sit as once elders did and listen to the sung voice that serves the Listening, allowing then for the possibility to arrive tenderly to a present, As T. S. Eliot describes it:
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
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