The Four Elements by John O'Donohue (January 2018)
John O'Donohue's life was cut short by a motorcycle accident in 2008. The silver lining to this tragedy was this book, The Four Elements, that O'Donohue's brother put together in his memory.
The essays in this collection were all published early in O’Donohue’s writing career. The resulting work was a true delight to read. In some of the essays, I noted the seeds of what would bloom in his later works – Anam Cara, Beauty, and Eternal Echoes. In others, I found myself guided safely into new territory by a familiar voice. Consistent throughout is the presence of a writer who thought a great deal about the world around him and devoted his life to work on the writing that would bring his understanding of the world to his readers.
Over the many short essays in The Four Elements, a handful of consistent themes emerged. Below, I’ve rearranged my notes from the book to bring a number of those themes together.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
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Beginnings
Any beginning is innocent for the destination is known only to itself.
I would love to live
Like a river flows
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding
Death
God is not an answer. God is the greatest question in the known universe.
A baby is fresh from eternity and thus needs time to get acclimated to the physical world. In Conamara, when a baby smiles into the air, it is said that the baby is talking to the angels.
A newborn always forces me to consider one of life’s great questions – where do we come from? One moment, there is nothing; in the next, there is a new personality, fully formed, fresh from nowhere.
There is so little I understand. But in the presence of a newborn, I understand better. I respond naturally to each gesture or movement. I hear the smallest cry cut through an impenetrable wall of noise. I embrace the selflessness required to serve a higher power and recognize that to help someone live is God’s work.
Exile
Perception is the birth of empty space around us and, as a result, the moment we become separate from one another. Perception is the source of our loneliness.
The soul is a shy presence and chasing the soul will only send it into hiding.
Silence is the mystery within, the voice of the dream, but if we crowd it out with busyness and noise we will come to fear what it might say to us about ourselves.
If birth is the entryway into the physical world, the moment of perception is the first step over the threshold. Perception sends the soul into hiding, into safety, as it leaves behind the eternal assurance of the beyond.
The physical world does not make room for the soul. Here, the soul does not belong. The day’s sounds and activities drown out the soul’s discomforted cry. Thought, feeling, and emotion become subordinate to the demands of the most unfamiliar vessel, the body. In this space where the soul does not belong, it contorts itself into the most unnatural shape in order to fit in.
The soul’s repressed call echoes through the dream world. Its chilling knowingness is a nightly reminder of what is freezing over. Every contradicting day buries it further into the coldest recesses of the mind. One day, we awake unburdened in the physical world. One day, we stop dreaming.
Colonization
Materialism is an obsession with the visible. It ruins our relationship with the invisible world, a world that contains our spirit selves, and makes it difficult to cultivate a healthy friendship with our interior lives.
To get used to looking at objects endangers us of becoming unable to look at space.
It is vital to try and look at our lives and the lives of those around us with fresh eyes. This strips away the numbing of perception that sometimes comes with knowing.
Disconnection with the dream world steers our appetites to what can be seen, felt, and heard. These establish the boundaries of daily living and help us replace the singular, trusting existence of infancy with the communal, suspicious existence of maturity.
Existence becomes the process of claiming enough space and occupation becomes priority ahead of all else. Intuition becomes subordinate to knowledge and the subtle rhythms of hidden patterns are washed away by a tide of details. By claiming all there is in front of the horizon, we lose our gift to perceive the beyond.
Community
Each person is burdened by the gift of uniqueness.
In uniform, theocratic, or fundamentalist cultures, those who are different or dissenting are the most vulnerable.
Creative art requires the tension that comes from our failure to never fully belong anywhere.
The price for unity, brotherhood, and community is the loss of individuality. The more urgent the need for a singular life, the less tolerant the group is of uniqueness.
The price for belonging is the pain of fitting in. The more urgent the need for natural self-expression, the less tolerant the soul becomes of the many contortions required to fit into the physical world.
Art sheds the heavy burden of the self and relieves the ceaseless tension between the part and the whole. Through creativity, the humanity bursting at the seams fashions its own container. Through inspiration, we ponder once more the eternal question – where do we belong?
Emergence
To change your life, change your way of thinking.
Great thinkers look at their subjects from strange angles.
Michelangelo felt sculpture meant to release a figure hidden in stone.
The creative urge reestablishes the lost trail connecting the physical with the eternal. Every new thing emerges from the inventory of infinity and each new thing heightens understanding.
The answers we were once surest of come under new scrutiny. Are the walls a safe haven or merely a shell to break through? Do we stop at the line or step across? Is there ever a right time to look back?
Transformation
Anger burns and blazes like fire. It can be easily directed into negative manifestations such as depression, indifference, or powerlessness. To awaken someone’s anger and harness its innocence and immediacy through action is the wisdom of living a creative and healing life.
The ability to handle fire is an exclusive human ability, more so than even speaking a language or handling a tool.
Transformation by fire causes what clings to the ground to suddenly and irreversibly defy gravity.
A world without limits no longer enables oppositions. To go forever left brings us to the end of the world, and right back to the beginning; to go forever right brings us to the same. It is the journey that leaves us forever transformed.
When we bring darkness into light, build weakness up to strength, or harness destructive energy to construct, we achieve a new dimension of existence and find our potential freed from life-long shackles.
When we are ready to let go, what ends can begin again. When we harness our transformative power, restraints become suggestions for our next burst of humanity.
Flight
We cannot take back our words because the air stores what is said for infinity. What is given to the air cannot be taken back.
It is amazing that we cannot see music.
The gradual, invisible flow of time is what affects us most deeply.
The great mystery of sound is how quickly the ear loses what it has just grasped. And yet, we can never reverse what echoes in the air. Like smoke, it is created merely to go away, leaving behind the forever transformed. And yet, the whispered word, the friendly greeting, the beat of the drum – each remains with us until it is gone. All we are left with is an echo and the eternal question – where has it gone?
Like music, time is an ever-present mystery. It was just here and touched us so deeply. How can what affects us so profoundly move on so quickly? How can moments so fleeting as heartbeats leave the irreversible in its wake? A lifetime could be lost wandering, wondering - where has it gone?
Recall
There is a great deal of healing energy in the spirit of memory but people seem to make less use of it. A collective amnesia contributes to the modern poverty of the spirit.
A memory is the seed for the future.
Technology does not have memory, only storage, and this distinction epitomizes the rootless experience of those who come to rely too much on technology. With too much connection to technology, a person becomes a shadow, the equivalent of one without memory, and life reduces to a long series of moments and sensations.
The spirit long isolated in the physical world understands perception only through the experience of isolation and loneliness. Memory reconciles the experience of the physical through the lens of innocence and recollection brings the soul back to its long-lost roots.
Each recollection is a return to the inner work that once came without question. Through memory, the inner voices long silenced by the outside world come through with a renewed clarity. The unity of spirit and the shared work of recall bring us back to the days when dependence on another brought security, energy, and community. As each of us weaves our own threads into eternity, every memory is revealed at long last to be a beginning for the healing energy soon to come.
Return
Thoughts are the inner senses.
Meister Eckhart – Nothing in the universe resembles God more than silence.
In silence and stillness, the mind and spirit are cleared of the clutter and accretions that have caked around the emotions and the soul. In this place, we will find God waiting for us to return to Him, to return into the eternity from where we once came.
The blind are said to have a heightened sense of touch, feel, and hearing. What many mourn as lost is often returned through a heightened perception of the physical world’s other communications.
Old age is often described as a series of these losses. The eye clouds, the touch dulls, and we increasingly lose contact with the river of time as it flows relentlessly downstream. The silence and stillness needed for the inner sense is imposed on us, gradually, as the river empties into the sea of eternity and brings us back into contact with the beyond.
Birth
Since life is the process of loss, it is vital to become creative with loss. What is loved and let go returns time and again; what is clutched to in vain was never ours to hold in the first place.
In County Clare, a mirror was held up to the breath to test for death.
Death brings with it one of life’s great questions – where do we go? One moment, there is a full person, inhabiting every corner of the room with presence; in the next, there is nothing, gone.
There is so little I understand. But in the presence of death, I understand better. I feel what it means to respond to each gesture or movement. I hear how a small cry can cut through an impenetrable wall of noise. I embrace the selflessness required to serve a higher power and recognize that to help someone die is God’s work.
Beginnings
Any beginning is innocent for the destination is known only to itself.
I would love to live
Like a river flows
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding
