The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon
Dublin Diary: John O'Donohue on Animals, Photos by Josip Novakovich and Delta Willis
Two photos by Josip Novakovich
The animals are more ancient than us.
They were here for millennia before humans surfaced on the earth.
… Animals live outside in the wind, in the waters, in the mountains, and in the clay.
The knowing of the earth is in them.
The Zen-like silence and thereness of the landscape is mirrored in the silence and solitude of animals.
Animals know nothing of Freud, Jesus, Buddha, Wall Street, the Pentagon, or the Vatican. They lie outside the politics of human intention. Somehow they already inhabit the eternal.
The Celtic mind recognized the ancient belonging and knowing of the animal world.
The dignity, beauty, and wisdom of the animal world was not diminished by any false hierarchy or human arrogance.
Photo by Delta Willis
Quotation found in John O’Donohue, Anam Cara (Harper Perennial, 2004, 53), where it appears as a single paragraph.
Copyright 2016, Barbara Knott. All Rights Reserved.