This is such a beautiful piece from John O’Donohue. Right now, with Venus joining Jupiter and Neptune in a festival of Pisces wonder and magic, the doorway to the soul is open wide and the potential to deepen our experience is that much greater. I found this an inspirational jumping off point for that adventure today and hope you will too.

All through your life, the most precious experiences seem to vanish. Transience turns everything to air. You look behind and see no sign even of a yesterday that was so intense.

Yet in truth, nothing ever disappears, nothing is lost. Everything that happens to us in the world passes into us. It all becomes part of the inner temple of the soul and it can never be lost.

This is the art of the soul: to harvest your deeper life from all the seasons of your experience. This is probably why the soul never surfaces fully. The intimacy and tenderness of its light would blind us. We continue in our days to wander between the shadowing and the brightening, while all the time a more subtle brightness sustains us.

If we could but realize the sureness around us, we would be much more courageous in our lives. The frames of anxiety that keep us caged would dissolve. We would live the life we love and in that way, day by day, free our future from the weight of regret.

—John O’Donohue from his book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

Share this article...