Echo
Echo tells us that whatever we give to the world, will be returned to us
ECHO
is beautiful and disturbing aftermath and as a word that chimes with its meaning, even carries its own lingering echoing response within its two short syllables. Echo is a word that carries the abiding, intuitive sense of the way the essence of our world is lived out through some form of foundational repetition and reciprocation: whatever we have to say, will be said again, in a slightly different way, by myself or by others, but whatever we have to say will also, somehow, be answered.
Echo tells us that whatever we give out to the world, will be returned to us, in ways we only half-recognize; what looks like self-repetition is actually a deepening and gradual revelation. In an echo, we are granted the ability to hear our own voice, in its truth and in its falsity. Echo also echoes with our intuitions around time: whatever we generate will come back to us in succeeding generations, everything sent away or lost will return, one way or another, in a beautiful, skewed, not quite symmetrical version of its own first issuance; echo is the sense and the deep unconscious belief that we will eventually, if we listen closely to far off things, be answered, and hope above hope, answered in the way we wish to be answered.
Echo is always a beautiful surprise and comes simultaneously from within our own body and from a reverberating, far-off somewhere else, arriving through multiple and simultaneous distances all at the same time. In creating an echo I stand for a moment at the centre of myriad variations of my own voice. I find I can become a creator of many conversations from one originating voice. As in my everyday life so in the experience of echo, one word from me sets off a multiplicity of responses.
Echo is also foreboding, the annunciation of absence; the empty room where children ran, but also, in that absence, the invitation to go back and meet, the memory, the loss, the life that once surrounded us but now beckons to be held in a different way.
Repetition through echo also reflects our need to admit things we could not admit to, the very first time we heard them. In Greek drama, when the gods spoke on stage, it was always understood that, heard directly from the god’s mouth, the message was too overwhelming for those listening in the audience to take in. The words of the gods could only be comprehended and digested after they had been heard again, after what had been said had been echoed and repeated by the chorus. In the reverberating echo of the truth, the chorus mercifully steps the truth down to our level so that we may understand it and then through repetition, amplifies it to transform our lives.
Repetition and echo wrought well into speech brings mercy into human conversation. When we carry terrible news of loss to another, if we care for the person or for the person lost, we will always unconsciously repeat the news three times, in three different ways. Our voice echoes the actual pain of the loss and must draw an equally painful and grief-filled response from those to whom we have spoken.
To listen for an echo from the depths, in our thoughts, in our reading, or in our listening to the repeated drops of blessed rain after a long drought, is to live in the deeper parallels that transform a simple surface life, into a rich flowing, unconscious, multiplicity.
What I am saying on the surface is being said in so many different ways with so many different understandings throughout every level of my unconscious body. Your reading of this essay can be just as original as my first writing of it. Echo might be as real as the voice that originally made it.
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John O'Donohue's friendship and his extraordinarily distinctive voice continue to echo through my life, in very close ways, both personal and professional. Though I do not quote his work due to the strangulating tendencies of the foundation that oversees his work, the memory of our many private conversations and the insightful arrivals we attained together through the years, both in companionable affection and collegiate discussion, return to me again and again. DW
ECHO
In Consolations II
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. © David Whyte & Many Rivers Press
January 1st 2025
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Echoing Life
Portrait of John O'Donohue
Photo © David Whyte
John O'Donohue's friendship and his extraordinarily distinctive voice continue to echo through my life, in very close ways, both personal and professional. Though I do not quote his work due to strangulating tendencies of the foundation that oversees his work, the memory of our many private conversations and the insightful arrivals we attained together through the years, both in companionable affection and collegiate discussion, return to me again and again. DW
Thank you, David. Somehow John’s work found me in the early months after my wife’s death. In particular, his book “Beauty: The Invisible Embrace” was profoundly soothing and revelatory as I moved through such overwhelming absence. His lyrical passages became transformative and served as a road map across a most mysterious and imaginal journey with my wife. I sat with this book reading each passage slowly by no choice of my own. Inevitably my breath would be taken away and I would become the pilgrim of my tears that gave way to such clarity and incite. One or two passages, a page at most —building a miraculous bridge back to my beloved. In some ways I am jealous. I would have loved to have been the invisible party listening to one of your conversations with John.