Come Dance With Me in Ireland
I'm happy to announce my Ireland Tour and Writing Retreat, September 2024
Dear Friends,
Blessings to you on these late Winter days.
Before I share my new essay “Come Dance With Me in Ireland,” about the call of old Eire that drew me to begin leading tours and retreats there twenty years ago—let me get to the exciting part:
Yes! I will be offering a “Landscape of Soul and Story” Writing Retreat and Tour in Ireland this year, September 8 - 19, 2024.
This fills my heart on more levels than it is possible to name. For now, I will say that if you have been thinking of joining me in Ireland sometime, or if you’ve been dreaming of a soul-filled, creatively-inspired encounter with that sacred land, I hope you will join us this September.
Ireland right now is crackling with inspired creativity. Their new official holiday in honor of Brigit, their patron goddess and saint, has evoked an entirely new level of celebration of inspired women in Irish history and contemporary life, and of the divine feminine in all Her forms on that small island.
At this historical moment when we all feel our world is more fractured and precarious than ever, it feels profoundly right to return to the lush and ancient land of Ireland. My soul, all of our souls are crying out for meaning and solace. I have found that Ireland offers that in thousands of ways.
Please let me know if you have any questions about the Tour and Retreat.
There has been much early interest in this trip and it is already filling up, so sign up as soon as possible to reserve your spot.
Blessings,
Carolyn
Come Dance With Me in Ireland
The line from W. B. Yeat’s famous poem kept flowing through me that spring of 2002—Come dance with me in Ireland. The spirit of the poem, written seventy years before, was ancient and abiding from its opening lines: ‘I am of Ireland, and the Holy Land of Ireland, and time runs on,’ cried she. ‘Come out of charity, Come dance with me in Ireland.’
Yes, I had said to this mythic invitation six years before, on a solo pilgrimage. Now I had sent out such an invitation of my own, for my first tour and writing retreat in that sacred land. It was all very real and about to happen, with twelve writers signed up. There was much to manage and organize, and I decided to lean into things I had learned long before. One afternoon, with Yeats’ poem flowing through me like a song, I went to an office supply store to find a very specific type of sturdy file folder to keep my paperwork organized.
I smiled as I purchased three of them, thinking wryly that I had finally succumbed and simply become my parents. Folders like this, with a tri-fold for extra organization, were well-worn and deeply traveled in their travel business called Club Americana, which they began in 1969 when I was eleven years old. Ultimately they took people all over the world. But the core of it all, and the place they traveled every year, was their ancestral homeland of Ireland.
I will always be profoundly grateful, down to the core of my being, that my parents brought me and my siblings to our homeland several times when we were teenagers and young adults. I was fourteen when I first walked Irish ground in 1972. My sisters Mary, Kathy and I stayed in the countryside with my father’s Uncle Andy for two weeks while my parents led a tour.
Sweet, welcoming Uncle Andy wrapped his arms around me as if I was a long-lost child, his hands rough, his face flushed and teary-eyed then breaking into a sunny grin, as changing as the Irish sky itself. I took in the ruddy, wind-worn cheeks of my relatives, their smiles and funny asides, their tired eyes, the warm peat fires in intricate stone fireplaces, the gorgeous music, the frayed jackets, the tall bicycles and strong, delicious tea. I ate the best brown bread in all the world, and felt the good Irish welcome and laughter that stole my heart. I gazed out upon great open Irish fields, familiar and strange, as lovely and lonely as you imagine them. I was, in some unnamed way, home.
I wrote The Light of Ordinary Days, my forthcoming memoir and history of Ireland, to track the story of how my homeland drew me back to her twenty years later, including my first major journey there on my own in 1996, and the many years of returning ever since. I fell in love with a new Ireland that was just then emerging, having joined the EU and on the verge of converting to the Euro and a broader sensibility. And I fell in love with a very old Ireland, one that lived on in Irish music, storytelling and folktales. I fell in love with the land itself, the way the hills, rivers, trees and fields seemed to whisper the ancient tales the humans liked to tell, rather than the other way around. I fell in love with the standing stones that were still, incredibly, standing, after thousands of years and endless rain and wind and weather had roughened and beautified their craggy faces.
Really, I was changed by the stones. I felt myself in them, I was held in them, inside the marrow of the bedrock and granite of Ireland, its very profound ancientness. Like relatives, I encountered these stones all over Ireland, many arranged by our ancestors into intriguing circles and magnificent passage mounds and ethereal dolmens. One could visit and respectfully sit with these beings and hear the echo of one’s own soul along with Ireland’s. When I visited the magnificent 5,000-year-old passage mound Newgrange, built of megalithic stones and oriented to receive the light of the rising sun on the Winter Solstice, I was moved to the core of my being.
At the end of my first pilgrimage in 1996, I stayed for a month on Bere Island, a small, isolated island off Ireland’s rugged southwest coast—a place more beautiful than any I have ever seen. A tall, lone standing stone stood in the middle of the island, placed there 4,000 years ago by the ancient Irish. I often walked thirty minutes up the hill and into the field where the great, dignified stone stood, ten feet tall, alone, in quiet grandeur. It became a companion for me, a steady and earthy guide. On my last day, I kneeled before it and before my ancestors and the spirits of the land. I was emptied out with the terror and ecstasy of true pilgrimage, and said simply: Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.
The answer that arrived was also simple: Bring people to me. When I heard this, it seemed the most obvious thing in the world.
A few years later in 2002, I had assembled that first tour. Twelve writers would be traveling with me and my wife Jean, with a focus on sacred Ireland and the ancient landscape. We would be with the land and the people, and we would write. I had piles of important travel paperwork to organize and bring along. Come dance with me in Ireland, I heard the poet say as I purchased those special folders. I went home and sat at my desk, feeling my parents’ bravery and initiative, and organized everything with a calm hum. It was all new and thrilling and a little scary, and also strangely easy, meant, and familiar.
The first night of my first tour and writing retreat in Ireland seemed to glow in Otherworldly wonder, as if the spirit of Eire herself rose up to meet my deepest intention. By impossibly good luck and serendipity, I had found a remarkable guide named Gerard Clarke to show us around the Boyne Valley, which has the largest concentration of neolithic stone art and archeological remains in Europe, with Newgrange as the well-known centerpiece. Gerard is now a dear friend and an integral part of my tours, and will be with us again this year.
That first evening when we had only just met, we all saw that Gerard was educated, eloquent, and full of depth. As we settled in the sitting room, he set up a slide show. He was from the west of Ireland in County Mayo, he told us. His grandparents had been native Irish speakers; he grew up knowing the language and remained fluent. Their original family home had been a thatched cottage in a village of farmers and fishing people. On Saturday nights all the people in the village would come to play cards, drink poteen and tell stories and hear the gossip of the week.
His name Clarke came from the ancient word cléireach, meaning clerks and scribes, the ones who recorded things, and their family hosted all of the storytelling. They knew the names of every field and every rock, and every twist and turn in the road, and the tales behind them. In many ways, Gerard told us, this was what he essentially was—a keeper of the stories of the land. He began his slide show with Ireland’s most ancient sacred sites that had so taken my soul—standing stones, passage mounds, dolmans and tombs from as early at 6,000 years ago.
“At all times, the focus in Ireland was the land,” he told us. “It was the connection with the land, it was the spirituality that went with farming the land, with living on this landscape, and in tune with the seasons, and of course the sun and the water. There was always this notion that Ireland was a sacred island, a green island, the land of saints and scholars. This notion is embedded in European culture about Ireland from ancient times.”
The places Gerard would bring us to were entirely new to me: the Hill of Tara and the Loughcrew passage mound, other majestic Neolithic monuments beside Newgrange, as well as early Christian sites like Kells Monastery, Bective Abbey and Monasterboice. The quiet remains of these monastic places, often only stone walls, a round tower or old cemetery, were haunting and alive; they seemed to speak volumes of time and aching memory. Gerard spoke of Ireland’s “ritual landscape,” where layer upon many layers of human spiritual life over six millennia could be found expressed, particularly in stones. Because stones last. Stones, he said, were the bones of the earth.
The shared journey of our group was magical and soaring. The land of Ireland has its own ancient spirit, and it enters a person and works upon you, inviting you into the lyricism of your own being. Writing flows easily as if the air itself sings. The stones and ancient places are overfull with stories. The people are wonderful, funny, rueful, and wise. The music, the pubs, the interaction with the ordinary life of Ireland, it all enters you and changes you, and we all found our lives transformed. Since then, every few years the call has come and I have gathered up a group to return for another magical, spirit-filled and always transformative journey.
Now in 2024 the call has come again, and it is time to return to that beloved land.
My last tour in Ireland was September 2019; only months later the world would close down in an unimaginable global pandemic. The ensuing five years have been long, and many wonderful things have happened, including for Jean and me the joy of three new grandsons. And too, these years have been frightening, brutish and traumatic, in similar and different ways, for everyone. I have carried my own wounds and heartaches through this time, learned some things and relinquished others. There were moments I did not know if I would ever travel to Ireland again. But there was, as well, something in me that always knew that I would return, that I must.
Now we are set to go later this year. The group to travel with us will come together as they have every time, through synchronicity, magic and grace. We will each find, individually and as a group, the new/old transformative story Ireland is holding for us.
In honor of all that history, you will see me carrying our travel paperwork not only in a handy modern device in my backpack, but also in a sturdy brown folder, courtesy of my parents, with thanks to my ancestors, and with gratitude to the trees.
I will also do what I always do again and again in Ireland: lay myself full on the earth. I will lie down in that land of soul and story, and feel her whisper, and say my own prayers of love and thankfulness. The ancient land will welcome me, and all of us, and we will all whisper to her our own stories and echo with her our own souls.
Come dance with me in Ireland. This apparently, is how I enter the dance, full on the earth, to hear and embrace the ancient hum. Yes, come dance.
All photos by me except where noted. The image of me with the Bere Island stone was taken by a stranger. During a solo visit in 2005, I walked up to the stone and saw a man standing before it with a camera. I took out my little Sony camera and asked if he would snap a picture of me. He happily agreed.
Yes yes! I have your name down in my binder and will send you the Registration Packet. Wonderful to share Ireland with you again!
dear Carolyn, My tea has gone from hot to tepid as I have immersed myself in your Ireland tour announcement. To the invitation, "Come Dance with Me in Ireland," I say Yes! For many years now my life too has run on 'synchronicity, magic, and grace', and only two days ago the answer to my going on the trip with you was the resounding sentence, " You would be mad not to go!" On the 2019 trip I was only 6 months out from my beloved wife Helga's passing and I was in shreds; but the land and the stones and the grandness of the trees enveloped me while I wrote, encircled by your quiet presence and the wisdom of the group. Please write my name in your binder.