Quotes by John O'Donohue

A BLESSING
May the light of your soul guide youMay the light of your soul bless the work you do with the secret love and warmth of your heart.May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul.May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and receive your work.May your work never weary you.May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment, inspiration and excitement.May you be present in what you do.May you never become lost in the bland absences,May the day never burden.May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities and promises.May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.May you go into the night blessed, sheltered and protected.May your soul calm, console and renew you.

For too long, we have believed that the divine is outside us.  This belief has strained our longing disastrously.  This is so lonely since it is human longing that makes us holy.  The most beautiful thing about us is our longing;  this longing is spiritual and has great depth and wisdom.  If you focus your longing on a faraway divinity, you put an unfair strain on your longing.  Thus it often happens that the longing reaches out towards the distant divine, but, because it over-strains itself, it bends back to become cynicism, emptiness or negativity.  This can destroy your sensibility.  Yet we do not need to put any strain on our longing.  If we believe that the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, then the presence of the divine is completely here, close with us.

When one flower blooms, spring awakens everywhere.

"There is an unseen life that dreams us; it knows our true direction and destiny. We can trust ourselves more than we realize, and we need have no fear of change."

If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings.  Sometimes the great famine of blessings in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love; rather, we are living the life that is expected of us.  We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature.

With complete attention, landscape celebrates that liturgy of the seasons, giving itself unreservedly to the passion of the goddess.

In contrast to how a child belongs in the world, adult belonging is never as natural, innocent, or playful.  Adult belonging has to be chosen, received, and renewed.  It is a lifetime's work.

The day is a chase after ghost duties; at evening you are exhausted.  A day is over, and so much of it was wasted on things that meant so little to you, duties and meetings from which your heart was absent.  Months and years pass, and you fumble on, still incapable of finding a foothold on the path of time you walk.  A large proportion of your activity distracts you from remembering that you are a guest of the universe, to whom one life has been given.  You mistake the insistent pressure of daily demands for reality, and your more delicate and intuitive nature wilts...  Your way of life has little to do with what you feel and love in the world but because of the many demands on you and responsibilities you have, you feel helpless to gather your self; you are dragged in so many directions away from true belonging.

As you grow, you develop the ideal of where your true belonging could be - the place, the home, the partner, and the work.  You seldom achieve all the elements of the ideal, but it travels with you as the criterion and standard of what true belonging could be.

Our bodies know they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless.