Weather Report: On Beauty

Post #12: "Walking on the Pastures of Wonder: John O'Donohue, in conversation with John Quinn"

“Weather Report: A 90-day journal for reflection and well-being, with the aid of the Beaufort Wind Scale

If you have a copy of my book, Weather Report: A 90-day journal for reflection and well-being, with the aid of the Beaufort Wind Scale, you might have noticed two things; that you are daily invited to write or draw, 'one thing you found beautiful today', and a list of reading resources at the back. These are not unconnected.

This is a year-long project to write several times a month, choosing one of the books from that list with a few wildcards too. I want to go deeper into the subject of beauty and, together with you who join me here, to deepen my own understanding of why it is important. Some of the books on the list are very recent; others are long-standing companions that I return to over and over. To me these are the kind of books that, having read them, I can gain solace simply from having them on my shelves.

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The book I’ve chosen for this post is, Walking on the Pastures of Wonder: John O’Donohue in conversation with John Quinn. Most readers familiar with the Irish philosopher John O’Donohue and his writings will immediately recognise the titles, Anam Cara and Benedictus, but this little gem offers O’Donohue’s unique voice in conversation with his friend and broadcaster John Quinn, on a range of topics that include; wonder, Meister Eckhart, absence, dawn mass, ageing, imagination and many more.

Maybe because I am also familiar with the voice of John Quinn, from his long tenure on Irish radio, (and he surely had the very best voice for radio), I can ‘hear’ both wonderful voices in this collection of essays, which were originally recorded for radio at different times. The essays have a meandering, deceptively casual, quality to them as the capacious and thoughtful mind of O’Donohue expounds on the various topics, given full rein by Quinn.

Here O’Donohue shares how thought and wonder might beneficially inform each other: And thought, if it’s not open to wonder can be limiting, destructive and very, very dangerous. If you look at thought as a circle, and if half the arc of the circle is the infusion of wonder, then the thought will be kind, it will be gracious, and it will also be compassionate, because wonder and compassion are sisters. (p. 22)

And his insights on landscape, the world we’ve been entrusted with, the privilege of being here.

[Landscape] is a high work of imagination, because there is no repetition in a landscape. Every stone, every tree, every field is a different place. When your eye begins to become attentive to this panorama of differentiation, then you realise what a privilege it is to actually be here. (p. 39)

As evident in all his writings, O’Donohue was deeply attuned to the landscape, especially that of his native west of Ireland. For example, in ‘Darkness’ he notes, with a supreme attentiveness:

Here in Connemara [and he is writing about a specific place called ‘Black Head’] there is a deeper kind of darkness than in the limestone of Clare, which is a very white, feminine kind of stone, sisterly, friendly in the light. Here there is kind of a light resistance and it gets very, very dark, but when it gets dark on a very cold night the sky is magnificent in terms of stars. Because you have no light pollution, you get this clarity of all these little white apertures in this big wall of darkness twinkling down at you. It is really amazing. You become aware that you are living in a universe. (p.68)

As I read and re-read this book I am touched over and over by the wonder evoked by O’Donohue’s attentiveness to everything that he dwells on. People who live in small farms in country areas could spend hours telling you about all the differences they experience between two places in the same field… It is quite amazing to consider the hidden, implicit structures that exist in all the natural things. For instance, the way water falls so elegantly, always with structure. Even the water from the tyres of a car as it goes down a motorway or street can have a beautiful structure. (p. 118)

His thoughts on time and possibility are perhaps a good place to pause… but before we come to that you might find it interesting to look at the very first of these posts, Elaine Scarry’s, On Beauty and Being Just, and what she had to say of the beneficial effect of noticing beauty. If you have been keeping the daily Weather Report journal I would love to hear what your noticing of beauty in your day, and writing or drawing it, has revealed to you. I know it has impacted on me far more than I had expected when I began this practice.

Now, John O’Donohue and how we shape the future…

How we view the future actually shapes that future. Time isn’t like space at all. When you think of space, you think of Connemara with the mountains stretching out with no walls at all, and if you look at Clare you see the little fields and the space stretching out towards the mountains and towards the ocean. We falsely think that time is like that too. You walk through the field of today and then you cross over to the field of tomorrow and then to the field of the day after that. But it’s not like that. Time comes towards us unshapen, predominantly, and it is our expectation that shapes the time that is coming. So expectation creates the future. If you bring creative expectation to your future, no matter what difficulty may lie in wait for you, you will be able somehow to transfigure it. (p. 155)

Revisiting the writing of O’Donohue in this book has been a real pleasure for me and a reminder to walk on ‘the pastures of wonder’ as much as I can. I wish the same for you, wherever you are reading this.

Below is an interview by Krista Tippett as part of her On Being podcast: John O’Donohue - The Inner Landscape of Beauty