The Irish Blessings of John O'Donohue ☘︎
It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, ‘Being here is so much,’ and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.
― John O'Donohue
John O’Donohue is a poet known for exploring how words can bless. Both in the traditional Irish blessing form he so often wrote in, as well as in how he spoke about language and friendship and our potential to nourish one another.
“I mean, when you think about language and you think about consciousness, it’s just incredible that we can make any sounds that can reach over across to each other at all. I think the beauty of being human is that we are incredibly, intimately near each other, we know about each other, but yet we do not know or never can know what it’s like inside another person. And that’s the power of poetry– it tries to draw alongside the mystery as it’s emerging and somehow bring it into presence and into birth.”1
Source: To Bless The Space Between Us
Also, he’s Irish, so it’s a delight to hear him read his work. ▼
A Blessing for Presence
Awaken to the mystery of being here and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.
Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.
Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon.
Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to follow its path.
Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity.
May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame.
May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.
Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.
May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.
Source: To Bless The Space Between Us
O’Donohue often spoke of life as a series of potential beginnings and thresholds, interactions with the earth and one another that can find added power in the act of giving and receiving blessing.
“When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. All our beginnings happen within this continuity. Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced. We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time. A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.
Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.” 2
He also saw blessings as a practical way of seeing and encouraging each other, of bringing something into existence that another might be able to use. “One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own.” 3
Source: Blessings
✍︎ Try it:
No matter your conception of God, or your history with blessings/prayer, blessing poetry is a form of language available to us all. O’Donohue explained it this way: “A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen. Life is a constant flow of emergence. The beauty of blessing is its belief that it can affect what unfolds. It is not the invention of what is not there, nor the glazed-eye belief that the innocent energy of goodwill can alter what is destructive. Blessing is a more robust and grounded presence; it issues from the confident depth of the hidden self, and its vision and force can transform what is deadlocked, numbed.”
You can borrow that definition, or write them in whatever other way feels best. Some ideas:
Learn about the kinds of blessings given in the places or cultures of your ancestors. Try writing your own in a similar style or form.
Look at blessings you’ve received in your own life. Who gave them to you? How do you feel about them? Re-write, respond to, or continue the blessing.
Write a specific blessing for something or someone that matters to you.
Describe or acknowledge a moment or interaction that felt like a blessing.
Write a blessing for someone going through a specific experience i.e. “for the new mom” “for the ones grieving” “for the first day after your divorce” “for when you didn’t make the cut” “for those starting out” etc.
Write a blessing you wish you could have given/received.
It may be in part because of the faith tradition I come from, where, as a woman, I did not have authority to give official blessings. But grew up witnessing them and absolutely believing in their power. Or it might be because this form feels so ancient, sincere, generous, and connective. The way it shifts my consciousness towards imagination and creating beauty, repair, and empathy. Whatever the reasons, writing blessing poems has been a practice I’ve returned to again and again, and I hope you have fun trying it out!
☞ Update:
In talking with many of you, it’s clear we’re all barely keeping our heads above water. What sounded fun and doable in January, doesn’t always fit into what’s happening in March, particularly with the kind of year it’s been. I really really don’t want to be one more thing you feel behind on or guilty about not getting to, which, sounds like for many of you, this weekly schedule kind of is.
So. We’re going to revise a bit. To something that hopefully strikes the balance between doable/not overwhelming and still a bit more motivation + connection than we would have on our own.
It will now look like this:
▶︎ First week of the month, I’ll send out this newsletter with a gathering of poems and poemy inspiration.
► Last week of the month will be Sharing Week, where we can share in our Marco Polo group, and/or here in the chat on Substack.
► In between, we’ll have more time to try out stuff and come up with something we want to share. You’re always welcome to share anything in the chat you’ve read, written, or want feedback on, but we’ll move away from the weekly sharing threads to just the one, end-of-the-month sharing thread.
Hopefully, it will feel more like a gentle nudge to keep making, rather than another Substack in your already clogged inbox or guilty item on your to-do list.
source
“Change is one of the great dreams of every heart – to change the limitations, the sameness, the banality, or the pain. So often we look back on patterns of behavior, the kind of decisions we make repeatedly and that have failed to serve us well, and we aim for a new and more successful path or way of living. But change is difficult for us. So often we opt to continue the old pattern, rather than risking the danger of difference. We are also often surprised by change that seems to arrive out of nowhere.
We find ourselves crossing some new threshold we had never anticipated. Like spring secretly at work within the heart of winter, below the surface of our lives huge changes are in fermentation. We never suspect a thing. Then when the grip of some long-enduring winter mentality begins to loosen, we find ourselves vulnerable to a flourish of possibility and we are suddenly negotiating the challenge of a threshold.
At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it? A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up. At this threshold a great complexity of emotions comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossing were always clothed in ritual. It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds; to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.
To acknowledge and cross a new threshold is always a challenge. It demands courage and also a sense of trust in whatever is emerging. This becomes essential when a threshold opens suddenly in front of you, one for which you had no preparation. This could be illness, suffering or loss. Because we are so engaged with the world, we usually forget how fragile life can be and how vulnerable we always are. It takes only a couple of seconds for a life to change irreversibly. Suddenly you stand on completely strange ground and a new course of life has to be embraced. Especially at such times we desperately need blessing and protection. You look back at the life you have lived up to a few hours before, and it suddenly seems so far away. Think for a moment how, across the world, someone’s life has just changed – irrevocably, permanently, and not necessarily for the better – and everything that was once so steady, so reliable, must now find a new way of unfolding.”
— an excerpt from To Bless The Space Between Us
And lastly, if you have a bit more time and are in the mood for a lovely conversation, here’s a 2005 interview he did for the On Being podcast.
https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty/
John O'Donohue Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
I read this post past 2 weeks late. Just a few minutes ago in fact. I still haven’t read all of it. Got to the poem of “For one who is exhausted “ and thought of my nephew. It prompted the text below to him. I discovered Jamie about 5 years ago and spoke to him for the first time within the last month. He is going through a hard spell. A break up with a woman he’s been with for 8 years. They share a child and he still cares for the young teen that she came with. His tattoo business is struggling and he just about lost his apartment.
The first parts of the text are quoting O’Donohue from Brinn’s post. The poetry that it evoked from me begins with “Jamie.” Nothing terribly original or well-crafted. It is a spontaneous un-edited one-off. But hopefully it will be helpful for him. Line breaks are mostly random from copying and pasting.
Text to Jamie:
Just came upon this thought by John O’Donohue, the Irish poet.
“When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. All our beginnings happen within this continuity. Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced. We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time. A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.
Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.” ²
And this poem by him will resonate with you:
“For One Who Is Exhausted, a Blessing When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks; Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight
The light in the mind becomes dim. Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.
Weariness invades your spirit. Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.
The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.
You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished. There is nothing else to do now but rest And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken in the race of days.
At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.
You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back. Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight, Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself. Gradually, you will return to yourself, Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.”
Jamie. You know this. You’ve likely seen this. After the horrific forest fire leaves lonely blackness it its wake. The scent of burned carbon having replaced that of the conifers and tall evergreen. No more whisperings in the wind between them. Green grass gone. The pollen and its gathers gone. Evaporated in the furnace of death.
But there will be a resurrection. Always. Below your charred and weeping soul is movement. A molecular indestructible grace that is Healing wounds that arose from this conflagration. This desolation.
A redeemed life-force within yourself that you thought was irredeemable. A beauty to enrich all the senses that you had distractedly missed before. Childhood memories of such presence spouting, emerging from a richer soil than before.
And all that is required is your breath. Your presence to the breath of life. Your patience with it. Your attention to that same Grace that connects you in millions of ways to every molecule of the universe. Your past, present, and future. All held within your in-breath and out-breath.
The fireweed will bloom soon enough. The lichen will recover.
Jaime, the above poem I wrote just came out of me in this moment while peddling on my bike trainer. Inspired by John O’Donohue’s poem prior, which was in an email from a friend from weeks ago that I hadn’t read yet.
Our world is a magical place. Write yourself into it. Run or walk in nature or sit on a skinny seat and peddle in a dim room—the combination of movement and creativity is proven.
Much love to you.