Born and reborn again

I think my co-workers are thinking I'm either very tired or are baffled by my silence since I have returned from Ireland. The truth is....I'm settling into this quiet space where all is well and there is really nothing to say most of the time. I have been deeply affected by this magic land. I'm still not sure exactly how, but I am changed. As we journeyed through the country for 10 days, I felt like I was gathering to myself little unknown missing pieces and stuffing them in my pockets along with the stones and wool. It's honestly hard to describe. The words are yet to come. As we gathered at the sacred sites as a group we often ended with a Hebrew song "Return Again", and at this point it probably most accurately describes what was happening. The words are:

"Return Again, Return Again, return to the land of my soul
Return to who I am, return to what I am, return to where I am,
Born and reborn again"

One of my favorite areas were the Burren and Conamara on the Western coast with it's grassy valleys and limestone cliffs. It is also the home of the late John O'Donahue, an Irish Poet and philosopher. I had planned on reading some of his works before the trip, but got side-tracked, but as we drove through his home town and as the land fed and nourished me and we drove past his grave, I found my curiousity growing for this man and perhaps how this land would shape a poet and what he would birth from that beauty. I have dove deeply into his words since returning and I am at a loss for words at the wisdom and depth of this man and so saddened that he has left this realm just last January unexpectedly at age 52. It will be a loss for us, but what he left us is a great gift. If you are interested in hearing his voice, I would suggest doing a google search for the OPB radio show "Speaking of Faith" and when you get to the site, search for her interview with him under "John O'Donahue". His web site is :

www.jodonohue.com

I share with you some of his words that describe what I have experienced in my own life in the last 5 years. This is from his reflections.

"When your soul awakens,you begin to truly inherit your life. YOu leave the kingdom of fake surfaces, repetative talk and weary voices and slip deeper into the true adventure of who you are and who you are called to become. The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown. Yet we are afraid of the unknown because it lies outside our vision and our control. The normal way never leads home.

Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for old patterns. Now you realize how precious your time here is. You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language. You see through the roster of expectation which promises safety and the confirmation of outer identity. Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells. You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits. When you begin to sense that your imagination is the place where you are most divine, you feel called to clean out of your mind all the worn and shabby furniture of thought. When your inner senses are blurred, you can see nothing in or of yourself; you become a respectable prisoner of received images. On this journey, you begin to see how the sides of your heart that seemed awkward, contradictory and uneven are the places where your treasure lies hidden. You begin to become truer to yourself. The journey shows you that from this inner dedication you can reconstruct your own values and action. You develop from your own self-compassion a great compassion for others. You are no longer caught in the false game of judgment , comparison and assumption. More naked now than ever , you begin to feel truly alive. You begin to trust the music of your own soul; you have inherited treasure that no one will ever be able to take from you. At the deepest level, this adventure of growth is in fact a transfigurative conversation with your own death. And when the time comes for you to leave, the view from your death bed will show a life of growth that gladdens the heart and takes away all fear."

He calls spirituality "The Art of Homecoming". He says that one of the intentions of a spiritual life, or a life that is open to the soul is to try to come home to yourself.

Just having returned from travel, I especially appreciate his comment that "no matter where you travel, or how you travel or how exotic your gurus,or how exotic the geography that might be presented to you for potential travel, if you're not looking after the identity of the traveler, the tickets and the destinations make no difference whatsoever".

His theory is:
"You need to go nowhere as long as you are fully where you are".