Beauty in all things

John O’Donohue was born in 1956 in County Clare, Ireland. A Priest, author, poet, and philosopher, his work reflects a Celtic fascination with the sense of divine mystery and the embrace of nature that remains prominent in that part of the world. I recently listened to an episode of the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett titled, ‘The Inner Landscape of Beauty’, where, among other things, O’Donohue spoke on the idea of beauty as a human calling. According to him, landscape isn’t just matter, it’s alive and capable of recalling you into a mindfulness and stillness ‘where you can truly receive time.’

This notion of allowing the outside world to help you be more present and appreciative of each moment immediately appealed to me, particularly in the midst of a busy time when it can be difficult to feel truly present in anything. I was also fascinated by the question that host of the podcast Krista Tippett raises: what if you don’t have access to the kind of wild and raw beauty native to Western Ireland? What if you live in an impoverished neighbourhood? Or any place that has been monopolised by urban planning? O’Donohue acknowledges the inherent difficulty here but suggests that locating beauty is not just a matter of observing external landscape; rather, there is a way that memory or imagination of the outer can be brought inward as a sustaining thing. This method of sustaining beauty, O’Donohue says, is what has saved many of us who have faced difficult, unspeakable things, because ‘there is in us some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we’re called to in some way.’

I was struck by this idea of the memory or image of beauty as a guiding, sustaining force. Something inside us that we can return to time and time again. It’s comforting to think that we might need only to retreat within to find what O’Donohue describes as ‘some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways now and again’. So often we conceive of beautiful things as fleeting and impossible to maintain, but O’Donohue’s concept of beauty seems to transcend limits in order to unite the human experience, time, and the visual world, intertwining what we know and see with how we live.