| I have been told that life is a pilgrimage. We walk this ancient soil where our ancestors have also stepped, and we are confronted with the chance to listen deeply to the wisdom in our blood and in the bones of the earth. This wisdom speaks of our ancient bonds and connections. It tells us that although we often feel utterly lost and alone, we truly are not. We are all part of something that lies just below the surface of the waters of appearance.
In the primal traditions of Ireland, there exists a custom of having an anam cara, or “soul friend”. In Celtic Christianity, this is the person who will be there to comfort a dying person and guide the passage of their soul. It is often used in a much more general sense however, as simply a co-walker in our spiritual life who’s soul touches our own. In the pain of our spiritual journeys, our pilgrimage through life, the anam cara is the one who we can unburden ourselves to. It is a relationship with a person that allows an opening and dynamic exchange of soul between friends.
The anam cara is not exclusive to human beings however. Celtic consciousness is one of animistic perception, and so all the world is imbued with a luminous divine energy, sometimes spoken of as Dana. Each tree, river, stone, and mountain has its own in-dwelling spirit and its own stories to tell. The spirit of these things can also act as anam cara. There are traditions of cranncainte and tonncainte, literally meaning, “speaking with the trees” and “speaking with the waves”, where a person is able to make contact with nature to heal wounds and gain wisdom. Whether tree, ocean, or simply the soil beneath our feet, the Earth takes our spiritual and emotional waste and transforms it, just as animal waste becomes fertilizer for new vegetation.
Beneath all of this though, is perhaps an even more important anam cara: Dana, or divinity itself. This energy is the essence of our great belonging. The Celtic view of the cosmos is highly inclusive and within it all things are perceived as sacred, just as all things are held within the sheltering spirit of divinity. There are no boundaries that state that supposed dualities are in contradiction, or that one aspect of life is more important than another. Farming, spirituality, politics, and family life are all woven into one, because fundamentally they all deal with the same underlying reality.
As a society we have largely forgotten this reality. We have forgotten our luminous bonds with one another and to the universe. With the loss of these bonds, we have experienced the loss of our ability to perceive the world as sacred. We have drawn lines between what is sacred and what is mundane, where the boundaries occur between heaven and earth, and we have placed these things in opposition to one another. These boundaries no longer meet, and are no longer as permeable as they once were.
I call this the wounded soul. It is a recognizable disorder, noted in some way or another in many of the world’s wisdom traditions, as well as in our evolving understanding of the ecopsychological relationship between human and nature. The wound is characterized through many of the ailments we find in the modern world; a feeling of alienation, despair, being spiritually and culturally disenfranchised, and bereft of any sense of belonging or home. There is a deep yearning within our hearts to reclaim some lost portion of ourselves, which often is played out in those movements that urge us to return to some primal state of well being. However, healing does not lay in the past, but rather here in our daily lives, our relationship to the universe, and to each other. It is up to us to initiate this process of healing and the befriending of the universe.
Longing, an important and powerful force in the Celtic traditions, is also a practice that we can cultivate to help facilitate this healing. Longing is what sent Celtic Christian seekers out into nature to search alone for God in what is called the Green Martyrdom. Longing and belonging are profoundly linked, and it is the belonging of God that these mystics were looking for. By allowing themselves to be absorbed into nature, they were giving themselves to the untamed wilderness of the soul, and thus transcending ego. They were accepting the universe as friend, as anam cara. The bridge between our alienation from, and friendship to the universe, is longing. Longing bridges the gap between the darkness of our suffering and loneliness with the intimacy of friendship and community. When we can befriend our world we are taking a step back into a relationship with the reality of the spirit, rather than the reality of the ego. This is a way of softening the edges of ourselves, making us vulnerable and open to the shaping powers of the universe.
In this sense friendship is perhaps one of the most important things that could be cultivated in one’s life. Finding an anam cara is a practice of healing the wounded soul. Whether this means finding a person to whom you can share your soul, engaging with nature and the spirit of place, or rekindling our ancient bonds with the Spirit of Life, it is a way of orienting ourselves to a life of sacred perception and aligning to the holy reality of the universe. By practicing the ancient tradition of befriending the universe, we can begin to heal many of the wounds that our souls have incurred. In the words of John O’Donohue, author of Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, “When you are blessed with an anam cara, the Irish believe, you have arrived at that most sacred place: home.” The Celts have always been a wandering people, and home is not any physical location but rather the Otherworld that exists between the mists. And so the tradition of the anam cara is a doorway or threshold that helps to orient us to the Otherworld, where the boundaries between apparent opposites are dissolved. We are then plunged into the healing springs where spirit and nature meet, and we regain our sacred senses.
Reprinted with permission of the author
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