Newsletter3b

Vol. I, No. 3 ~ January, 2008

~ One Life ~

-- Sheri Ritchlin

I was very moved by two emails I received this month, both of which spoke of a man I had never
heard of, never seen, never met. In our hyper-media culture, where thousands of names and faces,
celebrities and criminals, along with vast galleries of talking heads are presented to us each week,
the quiet announcement of the passing of an unknown person might easily get lost. But not this
person. His name was John O'Donohue. Although he was unknown to me, he was known to many
others and some took the time to remember him and, in a way, introduce some of us to him
posthumously. It reminded me that lives go on after death and continue to flow outward through
the memory and love of those who remain; especially if the life had a light in it; a warmth or
vividness. I think it turns around the way we look at our days: Even when the whole To Do list
doesn't get checked off, or we fall short of a goal and someone or something disappoints us, it is
not these things that will remain behind in people's hearts and minds. What will? It's worth thinking
about. The first email was from Rick Tarnas, drawing attention to O'Donohue's passing and sharing
an article by Jesse Kornbluth remembering him. I have included an excerpt below. The second
email was from my fellow CIIS graduate, Bruce Thompson, following up Rick's email with another
memoriam for O'Donohue, which came from his poet-friend, David Whyte and ends with a beautiful
poem which O'Donohue inspired. That is also below. I offer them both here in general celebration
of "one life" and an opportunity to meditate on what it is we are or do that leaves behind its imprint
when we are gone. (You can see a video of John O'Donohue by clicking here.

Here is the second email from Bruce Thompson, sharing the Memoriam by David Whyte.

I don't know if you saw this from David Whyte on John O'Donohue. Some friends of mine had the
privilege of spending time with him and David Whyte in Ireland and spoke of their absolute delight
in their experience and the aliveness he brought out in everyone he met. He will be missed.

In Memoriam
John O'Donohue

David Whyte

A drive into the setting sun of a summer evening, west of Ballyvaughan would take you along the
limestone coast of North Clare, with the salt ocean on the right and a rising, almost over bearing,
mountain of white stone on your left. The road grips the cliff edge for a good while and then opens
into dunes. From there you would see a long curve of beach and a far, inviting prospect of the
Aran Islands silhouetted in the low sunlight. As you drive, your gaze is so naturally pulled forward
into this horizon of fire and shadow that you would most likely, and thankfully, miss the narrow lane
to the left that disappears very quickly into the recesses of the mountain. You would have passed
the entrance to the valley without knowing, much to the relief of the people who live beyond its
entrance and who have enjoyed its solitude for centuries.

That quiet lane disappears into a sanctuary, one of the most hidden and silent enclosures in the
whole north Burren. The geological architecture of the valley speaks of shelter, the human history
of fortitude and the view out to sea from the surrounding hills, of all the possible and imminent
futures about to blow in from the west.

Out of that private, beautiful enclosed valley there came into the world a very private but very
unenclosed man, one who knew the need in every human heart for that sense of sanctuary, and
for that silence but equally for the high and necessary walk which brings the horizon and the
future alive again and again in the home-bound human imagination. John O'Donohue grew up in
that valley and eventually entered our world through that narrow pass down to the sea. He took us
with him as he journeyed to those beckoning horizons and generously brought us, as we listened
to him or read him, to marvel, to wonder, and to return home transformed. He was a rare form of
human possibility, a razor sharp intellect married to a far-travelling, Irish articulation and a
bird-of-paradise vocabulary that made the listener realize that until then they had never listened at
all. Like the valley from which he emerged, all the geological and imaginative layers of human
experience were present in his speech at once; he could bring recesses and contours in the
listener alive that quickened their senses, broke their enclosed imprisoning notions of self and
lead them on, up high into that clear western air, listening to the lark calls, letting the wind blow
them clean of worry, and returning them to their shadowed, home valley with a strange sense of
intention, of courage, and a brave, laughing almost flamboyant, sense of celebration.

I was privileged to have a close friendship with John, to witness him work and play, to eat and
drink with him and to participate in that moveable, laughing, bull-fighting, swish-of-the-cloak drama
that accompanied and enlivened everything and everyone around him. I also knew, behind the
mesmerizing cloak, the serious philosopher, the critical take-no-prisoners thinker, the responsible
head of a close, extended family, and the courageous, almost sacrificial activist, who with a group
of North Burren allies, took on the might of the Irish establishment and won a victory that changed
Irish law at a foundational level. This is a man who could hold the broad spectrum of human
experience together in a fierce, intimate and compassionate way, leavened with a humour that
defies easy description and that enlivened everyone around him.

John leaves behind an enormous circle of bereft readers and listeners, a great crowd of mourning
friends, and most especially, a shocked and grieving family in his loving mother Josie, his loyal
brothers PJ and Pat, his good sister Mary; his extended family, Dympna, Eilish, Shane, Kate, Triona
and Peter and more recently, but equally poignant, the woman to whom he had just committed his
future and who had brought him a happiness he had sought all his life: Kristine Fleck.

John was a love-letter to humanity from some address in the firmament we have yet to find and
locate, though we may wander many a year looking or listening for it. He has gone home to that
original address and cannot be spoken with except in the quiet cradle of the imagination that he
dared to visit so often himself. As a way of sending a love letter in return, I wrote this poem for him
a good few years ago. I hope it can still reach him now, wherever he is to be found and that he
finds it as good a representation as he did when he lived and breathed. I remember the bright,
surprised and amused intelligence in his eyes when I first read it to him, sitting by his fire in
Connemara. It brings him back to me even as I read it now, as I hope it does for you.

Looking Out From Clare

For John Donohue

There's a great spring in you
all bud and blossom
and March laughter
I've always loved.

Your face framed
against the bay
and the whisper
of some arriving joke
playing at the mouth,
your lightening raid
on the eternal
melting the serious line
to absurdity.

I look around and see
the last days of winter
broken away
for all those
listening or watching,
all come to life now
with the first pale sun on their face
for many a month,
remembering how to laugh.

But most of all I love
the heft and weight
and swing of that sea
behind it all, some other tide
racing toward the shore,
or receding to the calmness
where no light or laughter
lives for long.

The way you surface
from those atmospheres
again and again,
your emergence seems to make
you a lover of horizons
but your visitation
of darkness shows.

Then away from you
I can see you only alone
on the strand
walking to the sea
on the north coast of Clare
toward the end
of an unendurable winter
taking your first swim
of the year.

The March scald
of cold ocean
even in may about to tighten
and bud you into spring.

You look across
to the mountains in Connemara
framing, only for now,
your horizon.

You look and look, and look,
beyond all looking.

David Whyte

January 2008

From Jesse Kornbluth: "John O'Donohue (1954-2008): Our New Friend on the Other Side"

"Endings seem to lie in wait," John O'Donohue wrote. His certainly did. He died in his sleep, January
3, 2008, on vacation near Avignon. He was just 53. I knew John O'Donohue very slightly. I had read
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, the 1997 book that made him deservedly famous. ... I had,
over weeks, absorbed enough of this deceptively simple exploration of "soul friendship" to grasp
that here was an original thinker, a gifted poet and, most astonishing of all, a philosopher who had
forged a way of looking at the world that was painfully aware of human frailty but insistent on the
triumphal power of divine love....

I remember the cascades of laughter, the unbuckled happiness of people who are thrilled to be
alive, and together, and sharing good fellowship with sympathetic souls in a nice restaurant on a
rainy New York night. An evening like that is so rare I think of it as a religious experience. John
O'Donohue, a holy man if ever there was one, had a lot of nights like that....

[Kornbluth's article ends with this O'Donohue quote:]
"Our longing for the eternal kindles our imagination to bless. Regardless of how we configure the
eternal, the human heart continue to dream of a state of wholeness, that place where everything
comes together, where loss will be made good, where blindness will transform into vision, where
damage will be made whole, where the clenched question will open in the house of surprise, where
the travails of life's journey will enjoy a homecoming. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that
wholeness upon a person now."

Death was nothing to John O'Donohue --- a silent friend who walks beside us all our days. And on
the other side? "I believe that our friends among the dead really mind us and look out for us," he
wrote. "Often there might be a big boulder of misery over your path about to fall on you, but your
friends among the dead hold it back until you have passed by."

Let it be.

(Republished from HeadButler.com) The full article can be read at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/john-odonohue-19542008_b_80710.html

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