John O'Donohue

John Quinn

[A] collection of conversations and presentation from John O'Donohue's work with close friend and former radio broadcaster John Quinn. These timeless exchanges, collated and introduced by Quinn, span a number of years and explore themes such as imagination, landscape, the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, aging, and death. Presented in O'Donohue's inimitable lyrical style, and filled with rich insights that will feed the "unprecedented spiritual hunger" he observed in modern society.

Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

Walking in Wonder

Laura Mei

Landscape is always there; it has a Zen-like stillness to it. One of the lovely ways to pray is to take your body out into the landscape and to be still in it. Your body is made of clay, so your body is actually a miniature landscape. If you go out for several hours into a place that is wild, your mind begins to slow down, down, down. What is happening is that the clay of your body is retrieving its own sense of sisterhood with the great clay of the landscape. Water in a landscape is a fascinating thing as well. I often think that water is the tears of the Earth’s joy and sadness. Every kind of water in a landscape has a different kind of tonality and a different kind of presence to it. You think of the stillness of a well, of the energy of a stream, of the totality of the ocean, or the singularity and memory of a river. I also think the trees are incredible presences. There is incredible symmetry in a tree   ̶ between its inner life and its outer life, between its rooted memory and its external active presence. A tree grows up and grows down at once and produces enough branches to incarnate its wild divinity. It doesn't limit itself; it reaches for the sky and it reaches for the source, all in one seamless kind of movement. So I think landscape is an incredible, mystical teacher and when you begin to tune into its sacred presence something shifts inside you.

One of the lovely developments in consciousness is the dawning recognition that we are guests of the universe and that landscape was the first-born of creation and was here hundreds of millions of years before. It knows what is actually going on. To put it in a theological way, I feel that landscape is always at prayer and its prayer is seamless. It is always enfolded in the presence. It is a high work of imagination because there is no repetition in a landscape; every stone, every tree, every field is a different place. When your eyes begin becoming attentive to this panorama of differentiation, then you realize what a privilege it is to actually be here.

One of the greatest sins is the unlived life. If my own death were to occur tomorrow, what would be the peaks of my existence? The faces of my beloved and of others I love, and of those who love me. The dark valleys of devastation. Mountains. The ocean. The numinous music of words. The endless festival of the senses. The joy of music. Memories of hard, but satisfying days of work. Conversations that still sing in the mind. The harp cello of the Irish language. The celebration of the body in love. Being listened to when words were frail and suffering was sore.

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