What a book
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This is a book that leaves you feeling so uplifted. It makes you want to do something more in life.It is so beautifully written, and O'Donohue has some of his own poems in there. One is called the Blessing of Presence it's just lovely to read. One passage will stay with me, it goes as follows."If you have everything the world has to offer you, but you do not have love, then you are the poorest of the poorest of the poor.How true. This is a remarkable book. It was so sad to learn of O'Donohue's sudden death in jan of this year aged 52, he died in his sleep.
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Words to shelter in!
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This is no dry humourless study of Celtic Wisdom but a poignant crucifixion of Western epistemology. Although the anthropological question of authentic "Celticity" will probably always hang over it for those who want to problematise the existence of a truly "Celtic" culture, this book is nonetheless a book of Wisdom.
The author mingles his own "lyrics" with those of philosophers and poets from around the world, so that the text takes on a timeless authority in places, but we are reminded again and again of our own separate embodiments, the phenomena of individualised flesh or "clay", our isolation, and of the nonbeing that surrounds and penetrates us.
The text avoids the usual wash of soothing spiritual platitudes that lace other "works of wisdom". But, I must emphasise, neither is the text a clinically transparent light in which existential dread clearly stands out in its fullest threat. Instead the mystery of being is housed within a half-light which accepts its mystery as a sacrament.
O'Donohue, who in his own words is attempting a "phenomenology of friendship", compels us to feel again the mystery and wonder involved in approaching an other, and brings to this mystery another mystery - that despite our dsiconnection, recognition and affinity between people is possible.
But throughout the book there is another message being spelled out, very painstakingly, in the background. There is a sense that the author is calling for people to remember the space of presence, possibility and soul in a increasingly structure-bound world. We are called to find it in our hearts to welcome in the strange sensations of alterity and the sublime ambiguities of nature's wildness. We are being invited to bring home to ourselves the problem of modernity, the depair of meaninglessness, by cultivating humility and a sense of place; and by feeling gratitude.
As such, this book presents a limited poetic shelter for our wilder sensuality in times when we may feel bleached and de-natured by living within categories of identity. Personally, it makes me want to leap into a mythic world of heroic tales by smouldering peat fires where the night sky is crystal-clear and where the lamenting of the bean si can still be heard upon the wind.
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I am no longer out of step
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Having spent most of my life feeling 'out of step' with everyone else - this book put into words so much that I instinctively thought/knew and brought me 'home'.
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A beautifully crafted work with great gentle depth
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Each section, each sentence has been lovingly constructed with tremendous love and is remarkably powerful and yet so gentle. Also, John O'Donohue provides a fascinating link into the incredible works of Meister Eckhart. An absolute must!
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Woven more than written...you really find yourself
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Well this is a book that you really connect with. John O' Donohue puts you in the realms of the Celtic world. After a few pages you dont want to stop, we all are searching for something. Well here i've found it. If we only all felt our true heritage.
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