Sacred Cauldron Day One of the Wicklow Way

Seven of us gathered in Marley Park to walk three days from Dublin to Glendalough, roughly 45 miles of the Wicklow Way. Two of the people had not met anyone in the group and even those who had met, knew each other only from a couple of evenings of dinner. This small band was preparing to share three days of hiking before the beginning of the Sacred Cauldron retreat in Glendalough. The purpose of the retreat is to facilitate the development and practice of rituals in our lives; rituals that we create in order to foster a deeper experience with the spiritual. The walking pilgrimage is the fire that heats the cauldron of sacred transmutation.

This is my sixth walk along the Wicklow Way. Each pilgrimage has built on the previous experience while spiraling the spaces of life in between into a helix of ever emerging mystery. The knowledge of each experience has exposed new levels of vulnerability, creating thin spaces in the spiritual maturation of the soul. The trepidation, uncertainty, dis-ease, disturbing nature of walking pilgrimage creates the heat needed to reconfigure, even transmute, the essence of one's inner being. To quote Carl Jung, "There is no inner journey without an outer pilgrimage." Or if like Nietzsche better, "No great idea has been formulated without first taking a long walk." While walking alone is indeed a pilgrimage experience unto itself, to walk with others adds elements to the cauldron of possibility.

Walking pilgrimage together is a microcosm of the art of community development. Walking fifteen miles affords the time to slow down enough to listen to one another's story. Traveling over rocky paths, up and down several rugged hills, through dark forests, creates the hotspots of vulnerability, opening the unconscious to expand our consciousness. Walking as a group, watching one another personally struggle with the challenging elements, illuminates the compassionate soul within us and creates an egalitarian community rather rapidly. And while community emerges, individual identity is nurtured.

Ireland and the Wicklow Way are itself the cauldron in which we place the elements of our pilgrimage intentions. The lush green sheep strewn hillsides, the dark forests, the rich loamy bog, the singing birds touch each of our six senses in way we might not have imagined, evoking a mandala of imagination.

Dinner after a walk fills the ravenous canyon of spent energy, while nourishing the desire for authentic soul conversations. My pilgrimage experience has taught me to anticipate these conversations, yet each time I am freshly awestruck by them as much as I am by the landscape of Ireland I've witnessed so many times.