12,000 Steps

Above all else, pilgrimage is praying with your body, and it’s praying with your feet. It’s an exterior prayer, and the exterior prayer keeps calling you into the interior prayer. —Richard Rohr

Current Location: The Glendalough Hotel a stone's throw from St. Kevin's Holy City.

We five, we happy five, we band of sisters (with apologies to Shakespeare!) arrived here right on schedule yesterday afternoon in a gentle mist that cast an aura of holy mystery over the beautiful Wicklow valley.

Having plowed through jet lag and toured Dublin including Trinity College, the Book of Kells and the National Museum of Ireland, we made our way with Gigi at the wheel south into the Irish countryside.

We have certainly been praying with our bodies especially our feet in the last 36 hours. And there is a palpable sense of relief that we are here where we can hear the birds and the stream and begin to ease into a time of exterior and interior prayer.

We closed our evening together last night with this prayer which we shared everytime we met in preparation for our pilgrimage:

Holy God, bless our sacred yes to the call you have whispered to us, Whether a call to new adventure or the call that arises out of loss, we know you journey with us, guiding us on the way of imagination to new paths. May we travel with intention, being conscious of encountering you in each step, in each stranger, in each moment of disorientation. We ask you to bless our feet, that they carry us forward in this season to new possibilities. Bless our hands, that they might help us give form to our creative visions. Bless our hearts, that we stay open to wonder and numinous moments Bless our throats, that we gain courage to speak truth. Bless our lips, that we take in what is most nourishing. Bless our third eyes, that our intuition and the wisdom of dreams be close companions on the way, guiding us through the darkness.

AMEN