The River ~ John O'Donohue

LISTEN:

"A river blends music of movement with an enduring and accompanying depth of stillness. Again its journey is always out of silence, and this silence dwells deep in the river too. If only our lives could achieve, or indeed allow, such grace and elegance. If we could but find a rhythm of being which could balance a contemplative grace, a poetry of motion and an accompanying stillness and silence, our pilgrimage through this world would flow in beauty through the most ragged and forsaken heartlands of confusion and dishevelment. It would continue to hold a clear flow-line between the memory and depth of the earth and the eternal fluency of the ocean and never lose the passion of flowing towards the ever new promise of the future.

Though a river maintains a line of direction, it somehow turns still, fixed space into the embrace of a flowing circle of presence. It gives itself to the urgency of becoming but never at the cost of disowning its origin. It engages the world while belonging always secretly within its memory and still strives forward into the endless flow of emerging possibility. " from Divine Beauty by John O'Donohue