Leah Sookoo’s Reviews > Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong > Status Update

Creativity is rich with unexpected possibility. Know-how is mere fragmented mechanics which lacks tradition, context, and surprise. Analysis is always subsequent to and parasitic on creativity. Our culture is becoming crowded with analysts, and much of what passes for creativity is merely clever know-how. When creativity dries up, the analysts turn on themselves and begin to empty out the inner world…

Language is a great power. When something flows into the shore of your life, one of your first responses is the attempt to name it. A name should never trap a thing. In the Jewish tradition, for instance, if you knew the name of a thing, you had an inkling of its secret and mystery.

Words keep things present. Language has a secret life, an undercurrent murmuring away, audible in rhymes and rhythms, ambiguities and assonances. Most official uses of language are hostile to this undercurrent. The poetic use of language honors these possibilities, keeps them alive and sometimes reanimates the "ordinary" language we speak without thinking. Yet often our language is over-finished and cripplingly tight

Every yesterday prepares you for today. What today brings could not have reached you yesterday or a hundred days ago. Time is more careful in its sequence than we often notice. Time ripens according to its hidden rhythm. In its heart, time is eternal longing.

Regardless of how you look back on your life, you cannot force it out of the order in which it has unfolded. You cannot de-sequence your life.

One of the most beautiful images of continuity and sequence is the river. Always in motion towards the ocean, it continues to look the same. As Heraclitus said, "You cannot step twice into the same river." In a matter of seconds, both you and the river are different. The river is the ideal of continuity. It preserves the fluency of continual change and yet holds the one form.

They saw themselves as guests in a living, breathing universe. They had great respect for the tenuous regions between the worlds and between the times. The in-between world was also the world of in-between times: between sowing and reaping, pregnancy and birth, intention and action, the end of one season and the beginning of another.

Belief should liberate your life. Anything that turns belief into torment hardly merits the term "salvation." The reduction of the wild eternity of your one life to a harsh divine project is a blasphemy against the call of your soul.

People who inhabit the tormented prison of negative deity have awful lives. Tragically, they are partly responsible for keeping themselves locked in there…

There is nothing in the universe as intimate as the Divine. When the image of the Divine we inherit is negative, it can do untold damage. When your God is a harsh judge, he forces your life to become a watched and haunted hunt for salvation. Like a sinister Argus, this God has eyes everywhere. […] Such images of the Divine cripple us. If salvation and healing do not come lyrically as gifts, they are nothing.

The wanderer does not find change a threat. Change is an invitation to new possibility. The wanderer is as free as the wind and will get into corners of experience that will escape the settled, fixed person. It is interesting that the word “wander” covers the movement of persons, animals, objects, thoughts and feelings. Wandering is the natural & native movement of the predominant majority of things in the world

The Wanderer

The wanderer is one who gives priority to the duties of longing over belonging. No abode is fixed. No one place is allowed finally to corner or claim the wanderer. A new horizon always calls. The wanderer is committed to the adventure of seeing new places and discovering new things. New possibilities are more attractive and intoxicating than the given situation. Freedom is prized highly.