the Celtic understanding of friendship finds inspiration and culmination in the sublime notion of anam cara. anam is the Gaelic word for soul; cara is the word for friend. so Anam Cara is Soul Friend. the anam cara was a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life. this friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. when you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention and category. you were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul. …. the Celtic imagination loved the circle. it recognized how the rhythm of experience, nature and divinity followed a circular pattern.” (c)-john o’donohue, anam cara

“often in a relationship there can be a subtle homogenizing force, which is destructive. the irony is that it is usually the difference between people that makes one person attractive to another. consequently, this difference needs to be preserved and nurtured.

love is also a force of light and nurture that liberates you to inhabit to the full your own difference. there should be no imitation of each other; no need to be defensive or protective in each other’s presence. love should encourage and free you fully in your potential.

in order to preserve your own difference in love, you need plenty of room for your soul. it is interesting that in Hebrew one of the original words for salvation is space. if, you were born on a farm, you realize that space is vital, especially when sowing something. if you plant two trees side by side, they will smother each other. that which grows needs space.

kahlil gibran says, “let there be spaces in your togetherness. let the winds of heaven dance between you.” space allows your otherness to find its own rhythm and contour. yeats speaks of “a little space for the rose breath to fill.”

one of the lovely areas of love where space can be rendered beautiful is when two people make love. the one you love is the one to whom you can bring the full array and possibility and delight of your senses in the knowledge that they will be received in welcome and tenderness. since the body is in the soul, the body is illuminated all around with soul-light. it is suffused with a gentle, sacred light. making love with someone should not merely be a physical or mechanical release. it should engage the spiritual depth that awakens when you enter the soul of another person.

the soul of a person is most intimate. you meet a person’s soul before you meet that person’s body. when you meet the soul and body as one, you enter the world of the Other. if a person could bring a gentle and reverent recognition to the depth and beauty of that encounter, it would extend incredible possibilities of delight and ecstasy within lovemaking. it would free in both people this inner wellspring of deeper love. it would reunite them externally with this third force of light, the ancient circle, that actually brings the two souls together in the first place.” – (c) john o’donohue, anam cara

“the face is the icon of the body, the place where the inner world of the person becomes manifest. the human face is the subtle yet visual autobiography of each person. regardless of how concealed or hidden the inner story of your life is, you can never successfully hide from the world while you have a face. if we knew how to read the faces of others, we would be able to decipher the mysteries of their life stories. the face always reveals the soul; it is where the divinity of the inner life finds and echo and image. when you behold someone’s face, you are gazing deeply into that person’s life.” – john o’donohue, anam cara

old age can be a time of clearance. all perception requires clearance. if things are too close to you, you cannot see them. frequently, that is why we value so little the people who are really close to us. we are unable to step back and behold them with a sense of wonder, critique, and appreciation they deserve. nor do we behold ourselves either, because we are too close to the rush of our lives. in old age, as your life calms, you will be able to make many clearances in order to see who you are, what life has done to you, and what you have made of your life. old age can be a time of releasing the many false burdens that you have dragged behind you through stony fields of years. sometimes the greatest burdens humans carry are the burdens they make for themselves. people who put years into constructing a heavy burden for themselves often say, “sure it is my cross in life, God help me, I hope God will reward me for carrying it.” this is nonsense. looking down and seeing a people carrying burdens they have invented and created themselves, God must think, “how foolish they are to think that it has anything to do with My destiny for them. it has more to do with their own negative use of freedom and possibility that I give them.” false burdens can fall away in old age. one possible way to begin would be to ask yourself, “what are the lonely burdens you have carried?” some of them would definitely belong to you, but more of them you have just picked up and made for yourself. to begin to let them go is to lighten the pressure and weight on your life. you will then experience a lightness and a great inner freedom. freedom can be one of the wonderful fruits of old age. you can undo the damage that you did to yourself early on in your life. this whole complex of possibility is summed up magnificently be the Mexican poet Octavio Paz:

“with great difficulty advancing by millimeters each year, I carve a road out of a rock. for millenniums my teeth have wasted and my nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and the open air. and now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work. I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life.”

A BLESSING FOR OLD AGE

may the light of your soul mind you,
may all of your worry and anxiousness about becoming old be transfigured,
may you be given a wisdom with the eye of your soul,
to see this beautiful time of harvesting.
may you have the commitment to harvest your life,
to heal what has hurt you, to allow it to come closer to you
and become one with you.
may you have great dignity, may you have a sense of how free you are,
and above all may you be given the wonderful gift of meeting
the eternal light
and beauty that is within you
may you be blessed, and may you find a wonderful love in
yourself for yourself

“there is a place in the soul that neither space nor time nor flesh can touch. this is the eternal place within us. it would be a lovely gift to yourself to go there often -to be nourished, strengthened, and renewed. the deepest things that you need are not elsewhere. they are here and now in that circle of your soul.” meister ekhart