Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong Paperback – 17 February 2000
by John O'Donohue (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars 332 ratings
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There is a divine restlessness in the human heart, our eternal echo of longing that lives deep within us and never lets us settle for what we have or where we are.In this exquisitely crafted and inspirational book, John O'Donohue, author of the bestseller Anam Cara, explores the most basic of human desires - the desire to belong, a desire that constantly draws us toward new possibilities of self-discovery, friendship, and creativity.
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R E Davidson
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Prose. Beautiful.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 June 2019
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All of John O'Donohue's books are like a deep submersion into beauty. How is it possible to put so much profound thought onto pages such as O'Donohue does? If my writing ever comes even a single percentage close to the beauty of John O'Donohue's then I will consider my life's dream done. This book in particular highlights the soul's desire to seek a sense of belonging that is at the centre of all of humanity's searching for 'meaning' and 'purpose' and 'awakening'.
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H Rivers
5.0 out of 5 stars The wisest of authors, a beautiful read.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 November 2019
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I have read a lot of books on psychology, philosophy and spirituality; this is the wisest writing I have ever had the privilege of reading.
5 people found this helpful
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AVR
5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Read that must be Experienced by All
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 May 2012
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Thank you to O'Donohue for such a wonderful experience.
His book has made me
- lighter,
- more compassionate to those around me,
- more willing to listen to others' points of view with a real open mind and readiness to agree more easily,
- less anxious and less aggressive in responding to questions from others
- more in control of my being and
- more purposeful in personal encounters with others
As a Moslem, I was happy to read, agree and smile to every single point made in the book. It was a real pleasure and privilege to have found it and read it. I buy and read a lot of books but I do not comment on many of them, but in this case, I would have to say that this is a book that is well worth your time to explore it. I have already bought at least ten more copies of it to be distributed to family and friends. For me, it captures the correct spirit of how humanity should exist on this earth. It preaches the universal Truth and makes one feel good about going through all the experiences of life, whether good, happy, bad or hurtful. Whatever one's experiences, if one has a purpose for one's given life, then one will always find a peaceful and contented existence; and this book explains this point most clearly. Thank you again!
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43 people found this helpful
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Hazey Mcc
5.0 out of 5 stars It is so sad that John died so tragically young
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 January 2016
Verified Purchase
I discovered Eternal Echoes quite by accident, somehow the author, John O'Donohue has the magic to draw you into his writing and you have to read more. A lovely book,one you can dip into and always find something to inspire, comfort or, indeed, make you think.
It is so sad that John died so tragically young, yet, his writings will live on for, like the title, Eternal Echoes, Exploring our hunger to belong- the love and depth in these words will return to you just when you need them most. Thank you
4 people found this helpful
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Shirley M.
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 September 2017
Verified Purchase
Since I read Anam Cara, I cannot get enough of this author. His writing just draws you in. This book is no exception
2 people found this helpful
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Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to BelongEternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong by John O'Donohue
843 ratings, 4.43 average rating, 65 reviews
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Eternal Echoes Quotes Showing 1-28 of 28
“One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
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“May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
80 likesLike
“Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
tags: inspirational, longing43 likesLike
“Consumerism is the worship of the god of quantity; advertising is its liturgy. Advertising is schooling in false longing.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
40 likesLike
“Anam is the Irish word for “soul” and Ċara is the word for “friend.” In the Anam-Ċara friendship, you were joined in an ancient way with the friend of your soul. This was a bond that neither space nor time could damage. The friendship awakened an eternal echo in the hearts of the friends; they entered into a circle of intimate belonging with each other. The Anam-Ċara friendship afforded a spiritual space to all the other longings of the human heart.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
19 likesLike
“Functionalism is lethal when it is not balanced by a sense of reverence. Without reverence, there is no sense of presence or wonder. ”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
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“All human creativity issues from the urgency of longing.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
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“When your life awakens and you begin to sense the destiny that brought you here, you endeavour to live a life that is generous and worthy of the blessing and invitation that is always calling you.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
11 likesLike
“Each of us carries a unique world within our hearts.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
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“The restlessness in the human heart will never be finally stilled by any person, project, or place. The longing is eternal. This is what constantly qualifies and enlarges our circles of belonging. There is a constant and vital tension between longing and belonging. Without the shelter of belonging, our longings would lack direction, focus, and context; they would be aimless and haunted, constantly tugging the heart in a myriad of opposing directions. Without belonging, our longing would be demented. As memory gathers and anchors time, so does belonging shelter longing. Belonging without longing would be empty and dead, a cold frame around emptiness. One often notices this in relationships where the longing has died; they have become arrangements, and there is no longer any shared or vital presence. When longing dies, creativity ceases. The arduous task of being a human is to balance longing and belonging so that they work with and against each other to ensure that all the potential and gifts that sleep in the clay of the heart may be awakened and realized in this one life.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
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“We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious; we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time, we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
tags: celtic-spirituality, earth, existentialism, impermanence, mindfulness, nature6 likesLike
“Our bodies know that they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless. Guided by longing, belonging is the wisdom of rhythm. When we are in rhythm with our own nature, things flow and balance naturally. Every fragment does not have to be relocated, reordered; things cohere and fit according to their deeper impulse and instinct. Our modern hunger to belong is particularly intense. An increasing majority of people feel no belonging. We have fallen out of rhythm with life. The art of belonging is the recovery of the wisdom of rhythm.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
6 likesLike
“The human heart is a theater of longing.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
tags: belonging, celtic-spirituality, communion, community, dependant-origination, interdependence, longing, love, nature6 likesLike
“In post-modern culture there is a deep hunger to belong. An increasing majority of people feel isolated and marginalised. Experience is haunted by fragmentation. Many of the traditional shelters are in ruins. Society is losing the art of fostering community. Consumerism is now propelling life towards the lonely isolation of individualism. Technology pretends to unite us, yet more often than not all it delivers are simulated images. The “global village” has no roads or neighbours; it is a faceless limbo from which all individuality has been abstracted. Politics seems devoid of the imagination that calls forth vision and ideals; it is becoming ever more synonymous with the functionalism of economic pragmatism. Many of the keepers of the great religious traditions now seem to be frightened functionaries; in a more uniform culture, their management skills would be efficient and successful. In a pluralistic and deeply fragmented culture, they seem unable to converse with the complexities and hungers of our longing. From this perspective, it seems that we are in the midst of a huge crisis of belonging. When the outer cultural shelters are in ruins, we need to explore and reawaken the depths of belonging in the human mind and soul; perhaps, the recognition of the depth of our hunger to belong may gradually assist us in awakening new and unexpected possibilities of community and friendship.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
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“Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself. ... It is the deepest intimacy which is nevertheless infused with infinite distance.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
tags: celtic-spirituality, communion, longing, love, oneness, spiritual-seeking4 likesLike
“Our hunger to belong is the longing to find a bridge across the distance from isolation to intimacy. Every one longs for intimacy and dreams of a nest of belonging in which one is embraced, seen, and loved. Something within each of us cries out for belonging. We can have all the world has to offer in terms of status, achievement, and possessions. Yet without a sense of belonging it all seems empty and pointless.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
4 likesLike
“The soul is always wiser than the mind, even though we are dependent on the mind to read the soul for us.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
tags: mind, soul, wisdom, wise4 likesLike
“There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth. It is an interesting imaginative exercise to interchange them: to consider what is near as distant and to consider the distant as intimate.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
4 likesLike
“Life is full of magnetic interims that call what is separate and different to become one, to enter into the art and presence of belonging.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
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“You travel certainly, in every sense of the word. But you take with you everything that you have been, just as the landscape stores up its own past. Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
tags: belonging, celtic-spirituality, home, hospitality, longing, nature4 likesLike
“This breakage within us is what makes us human and vulnerable. There is nothing more sinister than someone whose mind seems to be an absolute circle; there is a helpless coldness and a deadly certainty about such a presence.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
tags: celtic, celtic-spirituality, humanness, longing, love, sensitivity, spirituality, vulnerability3 likesLike
“The hunger to belong is at the heart of our nature. Cut off from others, we atrophy and turn in on ourselves. The sense of belonging is the natural balance of our lives. Mostly, we do not need to make an issue of belonging. When we belong, we take it for granted. There is some innocent childlike side to the human heart that is always deeply hurt when we are excluded. Belonging suggests warmth, understanding, and embrace. No one was created for isolation. When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness; we become vulnerable to fear and negativity. The sense of belonging keeps you in balance amidst the inner and outer immensities. The ancient and eternal values of human life—truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love are all statements of true belonging; they are the also the secret intention and dream of human longing.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
3 likesLike
“Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
tags: belonging, celtic-spirituality, home, nature3 likesLike
“Wherever there is distance, there is longing. Yet there is some strange wisdom in the fact of distance. It is interesting to remember that the light that sustains life here on earth comes from elsewhere. Light is the mother of life. Yet the sun and the moon are not on the earth; they bless us with light across the vast distances. We are protected and blessed in our distance. Were we nearer to the sun, the earth would be consumed in its fire; it is the distance that makes the fire kind. Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself. No thing is ultimately at one with itself. Everything that is alive holds distance within itself. This is especially true of the human self. It is the deepest intimacy which is nevertheless infused with infinite distance. There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth. It is an interesting imaginative exercise to interchange them: to consider what is near as distant and to consider the distant as intimate.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
2 likesLike
“We live in a world that responds to our longing; it is a place where the echoes always return, even if sometimes slowly.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
2 likesLike
“The beauty of being human is the capacity and desire for intimacy. Yet we know that even those who are most intimate remain strange to us. Like children, we often “make strange” with each other.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
tags: aloneness, belonging, communion, divine-love, friendship, intimacy, longing, love, relationship, solitude1 likesLike
“In the beginning was the dream...
In the eternal night where no dawn broke, the dream deepened.
Before anything ever was, it had to be dreamed...
If we take Nature as the great artist, then all presences in the
world have emerged from her mind and imagination. We are
children of the earth's dreaming. It's almost as if Nature is in
dream and we are her children who have broken through the
dawn into time and place. Fashioned in the dreaming of the
clay, we are always somehow haunted by that; we are unable
ever finally to decide what is dream and what is reality. Each
day we live in what we call reality, yet life seems to resemble
a dream. We rush through our days in such stress and intensity,
as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world
depended on us. We worry and grow anxious - we magnify
trivia until they become important enough to control our lives.
Yet all the time, we have forgotten that we are but temporary
sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly
in the infinite night of the cosmos...
[.....]
There is no definitive dividing line between reality and dream.
What we consider real is often precariously dream-like.
Our grip on reality is tenuous...”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
1 likesLike
“There is a desperate hunger for belonging. People feel isolated and cut off. Perhaps this is why a whole nation can assemble around the images of celebrities. They have no acquaintance with these celebrities personally. They look at them from a distance and project all their longings onto them. When something happens to a celebrity, they feel as if it is happening to themselves. There is an acute need for the reawakening of the sense of community.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes
