On a recent visit to Ireland, I was staying in Doolin, County Clare when I had the inspiration to catch a ride up to Fanore a village in the extraordinary limestone region known as the Burren where Irish poet, philosopher, former priest had been born and raised. John did much to awaken an modern interest [...]

Here’s a short anecdotal story to captures the generosity of the Irish people and their openness to help strangers. I was traveling with a small group. We were waiting to catch the ferry from Doolin out to the Aran Islands. When the boat came into sight I realized that I had left my boots back [...]

My father was born in San Francisco two years after my grandparents arrived from Ireland and he grew up in an all Irish neighborhood. Yet I never thought of him as being Irish. He was part of a generation that wanted to be American and assimilate. It wasn’t until I went to Ireland for the [...]

Recently Judith Rousseau who came on the west of Ireland trip I lead this past September sent me a card where she so beautiful expressed the power of pilgrimage or traveling with the intention to learn and grow to the deeper rhythms of our soul can effect us in profound ways that we only become [...]

The difference between a journey and a pilgrimage is that on a pilgrimage every step counts. – Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage Ever since I first felt the pull of my Irish ancestors, trips to Ireland always have the quality of a pilgrimage where I let my heart and intuition lead me to visit [...]

Generally when I travel on my own in Ireland I don’t book ahead. I let my intuition lead me. If it’s a place I’ve never been I will study the guidebook and see what pulls at me. After my first night in Dublin to recover from jet lag. I felt lead to hop the bus [...]

The blood means nothing; the spirit, the ghost of the land moves in the blood, moves the blood       – William Carlos Williams People have lived in Ireland for about 7000 years settling there after the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. The burial tombs at Newgrange are a thousand years older [...]

The imagination is not interested in two-dimensional reductionism or naively pitting one side against another, dark against light. It is interested in the place where the two sides meet, and what they give birth to when they cross-fertilize each other. That is the heart of creativity. – John O’Donohue In memory of John O’Donohue, 1954 [...]

On my most recent trip to Ireland, just before the New Year I arrived at the Green Door Hostel in Drogheda, a small city north of Dublin close to the sacred sites in the Boyne River Valley. In true Irish fashion, Norm the manager, made me warmly welcome. When I told him I was I [...]