So if you’ve popped by to any of my sessions lately you may have noticed my wee obsession with this man!
My mum told me about John O’Donohue whilst discussing another poet we also like, Mary Oliver. So I got on to Google and searched him up. I instantly hitched on to his words & even better still listening to his Irish mellifluous tones.
Check out the man himself here chatting to Buddhist monk Sharon Salzburg.
Shared this poem above in the Friday Flow sess last week…
Whilst writing this piece, something spooky happened my phone pinged and this word popped on the screen as my ”word of the day”(yup got a geeky app for that!)
Sui Generis
Definition: Something very unique and that there is no-one else or nothing else of the same kind and so you cannot make judgments about them based on other things.
However what I think O’Donahuge is saying is that we are all sui generis.
John was a Catholic Priest for about 19 yrs then a Helgean philosopher. His most famed work is the Anam Cara published in 1997, A Book Of Celtic Wisdom. His last book “To Bless The Space Between Us” was his last piece before his sudden death in 2008 he was only 52 yrs. A fusion of Celtic mysticism & Christian theology is at the core of O'Donohue's writing.
Anam Cara is a phrase that refers to the Celtic concept of the "soul friend" in religion & spirituality. The phrase is an anglicization of the Irish word anamchara, anam meaning "soul" & cara meaning "friend".
Anam Cara reminds me of this parallel, the term Ahaṃkāra (अहंकार)is a Sanskrit term that is related to the ego and egoism - that is, the identifying with or attachment to one's ego. comes from an approximately 3,000-year-old Vedic philosophy, where Ahaṃ is the "I" and kāra is "any created thing" or "to do". The term originated in Vedic philosophy over 3,000 years ago, and was later incorporated into Hindu philosophy, particularly Saṃkhyā philosophy.
Happy mulling over a cuppa.