Vintage O'Donohue. A look and listen in the depth we usually associate with O'Donohue. Relationships, nature, music, art, language, are all part of the embrace. His own language is itself a thing of beauty. The additional delight in this audio version is the celtic music opening and concluding each chapter and the text is read by John himself.

A mystically beautiful book.. it sometimes transported me into a different state of being and urged me to question myself about various things. This book will always embellish my bookshelf, and I will probably come across as cheesy saying this but I will always turn to this gem of a composition. "When we experience the beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming"

John O Donohue doesn't just write about beauty, he writes from a vantage point within beauty. His words embody the beauty which they point us toward.

Every sentence carries weight. Very few books do that for me.

As an author who fancies that he has some facility for using language, reading Beauty was truly a humbling experience. In fact, other than Thomas Wolfe of You Can't Go Home Again fame, in my sixty-nine-year reading odyssey I have never encountered a writer with such a gift of language as John O'Donohue, and I highly recommend reading Beauty to experience of the author's incredible ability to depict the various aspects of beauty and describe thoughts and feelings about it alone. Add to this gift, the author's immense powers of observation and wise insights, and my opinion is that Beauty is one of the ten most important books that one could read.


Language...ah, yes, language. I will not attempt to use adjectives and adverbs to further describe O'Donohue's gift, but instead supply a few of his phrases which were my favorites. "Time had come to rest in the silence and stillness of Loch Corrib;" "the tired machinations of the ego are abandoned;" "the interior geometry of things;" the automatic traffic of functioning;" "addicts of the familiar;" "imagination has retained the grace of innocence;" and "the silent majesty of the ordinary." And speaking of majesty, Tom Verducci, a columnist for Sports Illustrated recently opined that "Defining majesty drives man to his literary boundaries." I realized how true this was when I was faced with trying to adequately communicate how gifted John O'Donohue is, and I would opine that John's boundaries were wide indeed!


Content...ah, yes, content. After treating the reader to an Introduction, defining beauty and its vital importance to our lives and our world, O'Donohue then separates his exploration of the subject into ten chapters. Looking back on Beauty, I think of it as a wheel with ten spokes: The Call Of Beauty; Where Does Beauty Dwell; The Music Of Beauty; The Color Of Beauty; The Joy Of Shapes That Dance; Imagination: Beauty's Entrance; Attraction: The Eros Of Beauty; The Beauty Of The Flaw; The White Shadow: Beauty And Death; and God Is Beauty. And in only 249 magnificent pages, the author presents the reader with a wealth of knowledge and insights in the various aspects that compose the circle of beauty. Each chapter is so full of thoughts and feelings, that one reads and rereads constantly in an effort to drink it all in and hold it. Then, as I did, the reader most like will say to his or herself, "I'm going to read and reread these chapters one at a time over the rest of my lifetime."


I conclude by again quoting Tom Verducci, who observed of another writing that "The knowledge and wisdom was so great as to invite our most ambitious attempts at commemoration." My most ambitious attempt to commemorate O'Donahue's Beauty is indeed feeble next to the genius of his work. I can only urge my fellow readers to enter its pages and experience for yourselves. It will change your life for the better! I received this absolute wonderment as a gift for my 75th birthday from my dear friend, Julienne Givot, for which I give heartfelt thanks!

I read/listened through this book at least a dozen times. And will probably listen thru it at least a dozen more. Such wisdom and vision is rare to glimpse in the word today. If something is laying heavy on my heart or troubling my spirt, I’ll listen to John O’Donohue shine light on the world with the only torch there is…the light of love and understanding. Magnificent soul was John O’Donohue!

n  “The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows.”n

In written form, this would perhaps be the kind of book one would read now and then when the mood struck. A book to set a mood, a book to have you sit a spell and ponder, as my grandfather was wont to say.

This was the first audiobook I bought, after I read my goodreads friend Glenn’s review sometime last year. Since Glenn had mentioned that the author, himself, had narrated this, and the author’s charming Irish brogue, I had added it as my first audio.

It didn’t take me long to realize that sitting in my house listening to this did not work for me, and so I waited patiently for a long drive. I didn’t really mind, having other books to read, and sometimes I would just re-listen to the beginning of this to remind me of what loveliness lay in store for me.

So yesterday, I left early for a planned excursion to God’s Kingdom, God’s Country, to experience some of what nature must have first been intended to pass for beauty. What better audio to listen to on my quest for that beauty than to listen to a book about beauty? And, in truth, it was perfect. I enjoyed listening to every second of this.

The only negative of listening and driving is not being able to highlight passages, but I did not miss a thing at the same time. This was lovely, spiritual – but not in a speaking-from-the-pulpit way, this a heart-to-heart spiritual connection shared on many topics, ‘The Music of Beauty,’ ‘The Color of Beauty’ are two of the ten topics. Effortlessly, as though you’ve just sat down and he’s pouring you a spot of tea, he manages to transform his thoughts with a lyrical aura of beauty infusing the words as he speaks them. Delicious, swoon-worthy splendid prose, prose unveiling images with reverence for the wonder and awe of every-day beauty.

n  “What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.

"When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.”n

I would be remiss if I did not thank Glenn for not only pointing me to a book I love, but to the wonderful experience of listening to this. Magical. Glenn’s review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

Profound - a book to savor, cherish and pray with time and time again!

I recently learned that my good friend John O'Donohue had died in his sleep in January 2008 while in Paris. We had not spoken since 2006. The last time we got together was in Galwey, Ireland in the Spring of 2004. I've downloaded every video and audio I could find on the Internet after spending a day in my own private Memorial Observance. What a sweet and yet critical soul! I have three transcripts and recordings of conversations that are each eight to fifteen hours long. While working at a prior consulting firm as the head of Research and Development, and later as the CEO, we brought John over to work with us on the philosophical core of our practices. These sessions were only and always spectacular, and through these I came to know him well enough to count him among my friends.

He always had an integrity of heart, mind, spirit and action that could not be evaded or go unnoticed. His poetry is quite lovely at times and quite piercing at others. His prose is always accessible yet in no way superficial. More on his other books later.

Towards the end of the book I got the right rhythm of slow reading that this book requires and really enjoyed it. At first, I thought it a little pretentious and so I asked a friend about the chapter on Music to see if this rang true, (as I am not musical), and she said yes, that does describe how I feel with music. So this will need a re-read from me in the future because I think I have under appreciated parts of it.

I really, really like O'Donohue's poetry and I could tell that the quality of thinking and philosophical exploration in this book of essays is one piece of what allows him to write the high quality poems/blessings that he has. Still, I didn't find the essays particularly compelling or useful.

There were some snippets and I'll quote some of those below but they came at too great a distance apart often -- if they had come in 75 pages rather than 250+ I would have rated the book more highly:

p8 Notions of self-improvement have become banal and wearisome.
p24 When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us.
p54 In "Crossing Unmarked Snow" by William Stafford:
"The things you do not have to say make you rich.
Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk.
Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing.
And things you know before you hear them -- those are you--
Those are why you are in the world."
p140 It is puzzling that in the Western world we have concentrated on the divine intellect and the divine will. […] When we bring in the notion of the imagination, we begin to discover a whole new sense of God. The emphasis on […] judgment […] begins to recede. The image of God as a […] moral accountant peering into the region's of one's intimate life falls away. […] creativity is the supreme passion of God. When we bring in the missing dimension of imagination, the perspective changes and we get a glimpse of true beauty, the glorious passion, urgency and youthfulness of God. […]
p141 […] the urgent fullness of God. There was such a fullness brimming in the divine presence that had God not created, he would have imploded. God had to come to expression.
p153 Although each of us is fashioned in careful incompletion, we were created to long for each other. The secret of our completion can only be found in the other.
p174 Freedom is not simply the absence of necessity; it is the poise of soul at one with a life which honours and engages its creative possibility.
p179 It is difficult to find the courage and vision at the points of deepest wounding to believe that new risk can take us into new life. But there is no alternative. When we remain sealed away inside the shell, we are no longer able to hear our own life.
'Beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life.' Nietzche
p184 However, the freedom to choose graciousness is a freedom no-one can take from us.
p207 'When night asks
who I am I answer, "Your own," and am not lonely.' Li-Young Lee
p227 Sometimes the urgency of our hunger blinds us to the fact that we are already at the feast. To accept this can change everything: we are always home, never exiled. […] In every moment, everywhere, we are not even inches away from the divine presence. […]
Perhaps the secret of spiritual integrity has to do with an act of acceptance, namely, a recognition that you are always already within the divine embrace.
p229 A God without a why is a God who is lyrical and full of grace, a God who has no other intention than simply 'to be'. To learn that art of being is to become free of the burden of strategy, purpose and self-consciousness. God dwells totally in fluency of presence. [vs Heschel? Prophecy?]

A book filled with wisdom. Overpowering at times, but saturated with thoughts meant to pierce the soul. I read it like a devotional, which worked much better than trying to power my way through at a regular pace. If you're looking for deeper insight into the nature of beauty, I would highly recommend it.