AN ANCIENT DEFINITION OF DAWN is the moment when one can recognize the face of a friend. A morning phone call delivers the news of the death of John O’Donohue, lark-tongued Celtic poet, philosopher, theologian, ex-priest, and what the Irish call an anam cara, a soul friend. At first my brain denies the hearsay and refuses to add it to its library of facts. In shock and disbelief, my brain trips all over itself, then I feel the sudden monstrous subtraction that comes with the death of parent, child, grandparent, sweetheart, special friend. Two and two no longer equal four, the world comes unhinged and a draft blows through it. I may grow old enough to know many loved ones who didn’t wake to see the dawn, but I feel fortunate to have had a friend as divinely articulate as John, someone so in tune with life.
He loved the thisness of things, as well as their poetry, and especially loved thresholds and awakenings and dawn. “If you had never been to the world and never known what dawn was,” John once said, “you couldn’t possibly imagine how the darkness breaks, how the mystery and color of a new day arrive.”
“Subversive” was a perfectly odd and daring word that he favored, one that evoked an insurgency of belief, an insurrection against habitual ways of knowing, a charity of awareness, blessed by the heart’s iambic, despite the ego-mad I am’s of everyday life. Presence mattered, perhaps more than anything, because he understood the tragedy of being absent from one’s own life.
I loved John’s belief in the feral soul of poetry. He found poetry a kind of attentiveness, a form of endless rebirth, a mystical path to the divine. He understood, as truly as glass understands light, the ability of poetry to heal a mutilated world. And so he practiced dharma poetics, poetry as a vehicle of awakening.
The first Irish poem, declaimed by Amairgen in 1700 B.C., as he stepped onto shore and claimed the land for his people, presents his spiritual and supernatural heart:
I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am the beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of plants,
I am the wild boar in valour,
I am the salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a world of knowledge,
I am the point of the lance of battle,
I am the God who created the fire in the head.
“This ancient poem,” John writes in Anam Cara, “preempts and reverses the lonely helplessness of Descartes’s ‘cogito ergo sum,’ I think therefore I am. For Amairgen, I am because everything else is. I am in everything and everything is in me. It is a oneness first known between mother and child.”
We once spent a day co-teaching a workshop called “Awakening the Senses, Romancing the Words.” We focused on how the lamp of art allows one to shine light into dark corners, glimpse the intangible, spell beauty, and pan through the flow of experience for nuggets of illumination. This was a writing workshop about paying close attention to life, using poetry, story, myth, and meditation to honor the call of beauty and develop our capacity to find it in the most unexpected places.
I called him OJohn, and we were slated to meet at a symposium a few months from now, and again at a mindfulness retreat in late fall. I already lament those missed reunions and confluence of hearts and minds. But mainly I feel lucky to have known one of life’s sublime celebrants for a few of his dawns. In the spirit of his poetic Blessings: May your mornings greet you with such a friend.
John’s poetry and prose is so deliciously smeared with the senses that I can picture him now, fiercely alive with the electric fizz of being, not dead, just out of reach for a while, writing in his seaside house in Connemara, Ireland. My mind furnishes his house and places him in it, as it always has—how can he not be there now?
OJohn, the first light this morning that doesn’t shine for you hangs on the air like old yellowed linen. Shouldn’t there be scarlet banners celebrating your passionate verve? Or at least a plume of color staining the sky the way you left your imprint on everyone, reaching deep into them, finding their state of highest grace, and helping them rise to it? You knew the best one could become, the plateaus of being, and the thresholds that arise, frighten, but must be crossed to become the self one dreams. I didn’t know you often, but deeply, as a pilgrim side of me.
On the last evening of your life, you slept with your fiancée, Kristine, felt saturated with joy, having spent the happiest day. You were that rare man who met the girl of his dreams and stayed happy for the rest of his life—but only a few hours remained of it. You were fifty-three, planning a marriage, picturing the faces of the children you hoped for, full of a thousand blessings. For hundreds of thousands of years, most of our time on this planet, people could expect a lifespan of only eighteen years, still, fifty-three seems shockingly few.
Everyone who ever spent time with you came away changed. It’s not that you were nobler than other noble souls, or more devout, or kinder, or more reverent. You drank too much, were prankish, could be hilariously irreverent. But you lived your words about being present in the world, you were able to be utterly alive in an era of distractions.
Had you awakened, you would have found the sky right where you left it, the way we all do, your sweetheart beside you, nestled in the aura of romantic love with all its hallelujahs. Your future included a new collection of poetry and prose called Blessing the Space Between Us, and the silent blessings of all your students and readers, the newlyweds whose vows you blessed, the mourners whose loved ones you buried, the parents whose newborns you helped christen, and the flock of spiritual seekers whose hunger you fed.
We all died last night, as we do every night. Waking is always a resurrection after what might have been death. What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.