The Most Beautiful Interview I’ve Ever Heard
Have you ever heard words that act like a key, unlocking a covered place within you? Where the message, the cadence, and all the experience behind the words land in such a way that tears of deep understanding can’t help but form? This interview with the late Irish mystic and lover-of-life, John O’Donahue, contains those words.
For a wanderer, “living the questions” can become a cerebral process. But Rilke also advises his young poet friend to “love the questions.” To me, that’s venturing into the realm of beauty. The interview with John O’Donahue is aptly titled “The Inner Landscape of Beauty.”
Download and listen to the interview (great for a long walk :))
I’d love to do a more thorough parsing of all the gems in there at some point. For now, here are links to the show page from the wonderful radio program “On Being,” the transcript of the interview, and just one excerpt (partly from the unedited version; my emphasis added) from John O’Donahue’s words on time and what it has to do with a soul-ful way of being:
Now, there are big psychological tomes written on stress. But for me, philosophically, stress is a perverted relationship to time. So that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven’t had a true moment for yourself. And you know, to relax in and to just be.
Meister Eckhart, whom I love, said you know so many people come to me asking how I should pray, how I should think, what I should do and the whole time they neglect the most important question which is HOW should I BE? And I think when you slow it down, then you find your rhythm, and when you come into rhythm, then you come into a different kind of time.
Because, you know, the way in this country — there’s all the different [time] zones. I think there are these zones within us as well. There’s surface time, which is really a rapid-fire Ferrari time. And then if you sit down, like, Dan Siegel, my friend, does this lovely meditation, you know: You imagine the surface of the ocean is all restless and then you slip down deep below the surface where it’s still and where things move slower.
And what I love in this regard is my old friend Meister Eckhart, 14th-century mystic. He said, “There is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch.”
And I really thought that was amazing, and if you cash it out what it means is, that your identity is not equivalent to your biography. And that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.
