Support Miriam's Well

Through the Eyes of Visitors and Participants

Miriam's Well is a peaceful and magical place, so those who come here often have unique insights and experiences. We share some of these here.

Summer Sanctuaries
by Christopher Sippel

Dream Time
by Barbara Wolkoff

A Weekend of Light with John O’Donohue
by Sarah Rolph

Wiggling Into the Universe
by Barbara Landis

<><><>

Dream Time
by Barbara Wolkoff

Last fall, Jeremy Taylor came to Miriam’s Well for the first time. So did I. What I found at Miriam’s Well (I knew what to expect with Jeremy) was a beautiful setting, filled with interesting, open and committed people. Miriam’s Well’s mission includes the following: To Initiate and Sustain Conscious Spiritual Evolution. Dream work with Jeremy has been, for me, a profound part of my own conscious spiritual evolution, and seems a perfect fit with the mission of Miriam’s Well.

More than 15 years ago I started my dream work journey. I was blessed at the time to have a dear friend who insisted I join a group guided by a man named Jeremy Taylor. At the time I thought, "hey, I know about my dreams, I know what they mean." To a degree that was true. And there was a larger, deeper pool of possibility in working with dreams and in dream groups than I had ever imagined.

What always amazes me about the dream groups or dream weekends I have participated in with Jeremy is the depth of knowledge, feeling and experience that each participant brings to the circle. I have met people on the Friday night of a weekend workshop and wondered, “what do I have in common with them?” The level of dream work that evolves over the next days inevitably reveals that we have many things in common. I can not think of a dream that I’ve ever heard shared that hasn’t held some kind of “aha” for me by the time our work on that dream comes to a close.

There are Six Basic Hints for Dream Work that Jeremy has developed over his more than 30 years of working with people and their dreams. ( http://www.jeremytaylor.com/pages/toolkit.html ) Using the toolkit is a very powerful aid in the work of the dream group. One of the six tools encourages participants to preface any remark with the words, “If this were my dream….” Adopting this phrase serves at least two purposes. First, it acknowledges that how I hear the shared dream is my version of and projection onto it. Second, using this form makes even the most challenging comment more easily heard by the dreamer.

The most profound difference for me in having embraced the use of the “If it were my dream” construct over the last 15 years is how the idea of that phrase has seeped it’s way into my daily life and speech. More often than not, if a colleague or friend asks my advice about a difficult circumstance or choice they are facing–a situation where I could easily say “You should…” or “the reason that happened is…”–there is always an aspect of "if it were my circumstance or my choice” in my mind. I understand that when someone asks me what I would do about their problem or question, it doesn’t mean my answer is what they should do, but only what I imagine the best course of action to be, were I in their shoes. It enriches me as a human being to reclaim my projections. It makes it more difficult for others to place their projections on me. This is just one example of how dream work has enhanced my life.

I do dream work because it supports me in showing up more fully in my life and the lives of those around me. I don’t always like what I learn. I can’t always hear what is there for me to learn. Still, it’s the journey of a lifetime–for the challenge, for the pain, for the joy, for the sadness, for the laughter, I wouldn’t miss a minute of it. It’s what makes me alive.

<><><>

A Weekend of Light with John O’Donohue
by Sarah Rolph

Some authors seem to reserve their best for the page—writing is, after all, a very private endeavor. John O’Donohue’s presence in person pales in comparison to his greatness on paper. On the contrary, his presence is even more beautiful than his writing. There is a strength and wisdom that emanates from O’Donohue, as if he were the most wise and loving grandparent one could imagine or a wonderfully inspiring priest, which in fact he once was (now he is a wonderful inspiring ex-priest). Yet instead of speaking only of God, O’Donohue’s lectures encompass the world and more, ranging far and wide, weaving life, love, literature and the grandeur of God into wide swaths of poetry that blanket the audience like a spell. “Keep something beautiful in your heart,” he quoted from Pascal on Friday night of The Call of Beauty the November 2003 weekend that Miriam’s Well hosted at the Dolce Heritage Conference Center in Southbury, CT. It was as if he were planting the thought inside of us.

Interspersed with lecture, quotations, and readings, were meditations, in which we were led with gentle words into the hearts of our imaginations. That first night the theme was our individual thresholds—where were we now in our lives? We were to imagine the possibilities of the thresholds we were nearing.

One of the thoughts that startled me in O’Donohue’s introduction to Beauty, his topic for the weekend (and the subject of his latest book), was the observation that we have come to think of Beauty as the exception rather than the rule. We have become so acquainted with ugliness. This sort of chilling realization continued throughout the weekend, as would uplifting quotes such this one from Dostoyevsky: Maybe beauty will save us in the end.

At the end of Friday evening’s lecture, we were given a thought to take with us that night. “Shine the light of these questions on yourself,” said O’Donohue in his lovely poetic way. “Where is the beauty in your life? How are you following it? Set a gentle expectation to find something for yourself,” he said, and asked us to pay attention to our dreams that night—we were to invite a dream, remember it in the morning before opening our eyes, and then write it down.

I dreamed of a friend who was about to undergo surgery; a funny, sad, strange dream that gave me a painful gift. Writing that dream the next morning I cried the only tears I would find in myself during that time. It was a rip in the mask of my fear, a wound that planted the seeds of healing; months later, I would write a poem about that fear.

Saturday morning when I arrived at the lecture, I was still in pain from this dream. A woman I didn’t know asked me how my night had been, and whether I had dreamed. I told her I had had a terribly heavy dream, then I became emotional and shut my mouth. But the woman kept listening—to my heart. There would be many encounters like that throughout the workshop, as our hearts seemed to naturally open to one another.

The Saturday morning meditation began with envisioning ourselves in a favorite place. Then we see a stranger heading toward us, and when the stranger comes close, we see it is ourselves. We see that we are naked. We gaze into the eyes of our naked self, and then we take this self into our arms. The tears were flowing down my face at this point, and Laura, a staff member at Miriam’s Well sitting next to me, was crying as well. The simple self-acceptance in this meditation was a powerful healing force.

We are all looking for ourselves, O’Donohue told us, but we can’t find ourselves by looking. Often it’s at the time of least attention, when we’ve called off the hunt, that we will find what we seek. So we must have a capacity to receive. This capacity is what we had created in our imaginations when we took our vulnerable, naked selves into our arms.

O’Donohue is no fan of popular psychology; he is, in general, a searing critic of the field. “Human nature—the deepest essence—is still missing from most psychology,” he says. His work helps to correct this loss. He finds the images that are natural to human healing, and presents them to us in the form of, to use his phrase, “a poetics of growth.” For example, he gave us a simple, graphic image of a groove and a core inside of us. Our task is metaphorically put the core into the groove, he tells us—not through intention, but through invitation, using the hidden capacity to receive that he had just shown us. This invited result could be called God, or integration, or home—the words are not important, he told us, what matters is the reality of spiritual homecoming.

Individuation is another word he used, saying “the journey for humans is to attempt to draw closer to oneself.” On this extraordinary weekend, we felt ourselves embarking on that journey. With O’Donohue’s guidance.

How we look at things in large part shapes what we see, we were told: “Beautifying the gaze will allow you to see beauty.” We practiced beautifying our gaze. “Beauty can’t be captured or controlled.” We contemplated its wild power. The gentle questions continued. “Try to get a look at your center; is the core in the groove? Where at this time have you no rhythm? What have you done with your creativity? How have you squandered it? What is the unexpected thing you could risk to turn an aspect of your life toward creativity?” And we were directed to look for a link between the answers to these questions and the previous night’s dream.

Saturday afternoon we learned about reverence as a path toward beauty. “Reverence is a disposition of the senses and the body, not an intention. Not relentless piousness, but clarity.” Reverence. A powerful word, and an apt one for the state of mind that came upon us as we basked in the light of O’Donohue’s stimulating presence, beautiful words, and deep ideas. And then he gave us a terrifying image of the opposite of reverence. He told a story about a person seeing a photograph in a magazine and observing that the model looked like some kind of predator, and the question stimulated by that observation was a haunting one: “Why do we think we’re so harmless?” Why, indeed?

My notes from the weekend are a series of quotes, disconnected but beautiful. “At the angel bar—what does your angel say about you?” “Subject-object is not always the right model; sometimes it’s between-ness.” A quote from Louise Gluck: “The thing that is broken has particular authority over the act of change.” “The dark industry of pain and transfiguration . . . (Wordsworth?).” “In bleak times, use your own inner mirror; go toward yourself with affection and expectation.”

And more questions for us to take into our evening: Where have I created a false comfort zone? What am I not leaving myself open to? What have I done with the divine? Where does the pulse of infinity beat loudest in my life? Who is the person who needs me most that I’m devoting the least attention to? The hotel at which the workshop was held has a nice indoor pool, hot tub, and steam room; I enjoyed their comforts as I contemplated these life questions.

Fittingly for early November, the day of the dead in some cultures—indeed, the entire month of November is devoted to the dead in Ireland, we learned, the Sunday morning meditation contemplated the death of a loved one. We were led through the process of watching the departure, then at the end of the meditation we gazed into the face of the one who had been lost. I had a strange feeling at this point; I felt such pain at the loss of my friend, yet gazing at her in my mind’s eye I smiled broadly even while I was crying; it felt so good to see her face that I didn’t want to open my eyes.

O’Donohue’s discussion after this exercise was about “the unfilled gap”—allowing ourselves to leave room for the presence of the departed. Another example of his characteristic ability to find words for strange but important aspects of human wisdom.

As the time approached for the weekend to end, the group became a bit restless. We all wanted to share something. Laura got up and read some of her heartbreakingly beautiful poems, and O’Donohue’s response was itself beautiful. “That’s the real thing,” he said. “It takes a lot of courage to get up in front of a crowd and be naked like that, when all the rest of us are sitting here with everything covered up but just the top bits,” making the point beautifully (and making our faces feel rather more naked than we generally know them to be). A gentleman read some words from Jim Morrison, of The Doors fame, who would have been 60 that week, had he lived; it was a lovely passage about how poetry belongs to everyone. Another participant, Sharon, read an intensely beautiful poem she had written about O’Donohue, which resonated deeply with all of us.

It was a beautiful, meaningful weekend, and the experience was a lasting one.

Throughout his lectures, O’Donohue sprinkled references to various authors. I made notes of these, and read many of the works in the weeks and months after the lecture. The most beautiful of the suggested readings, for me, was the letters of John Keats. O’Donohue suggested them as particularly appropriate reading for Advent. Not having had a previous attachment to the Christian tradition, I barely knew what Advent was, the weeks leading up to Christmas having been for me as a child more a matter of waiting for presents than for presence, if you will. But reading the letters of Keats last year in the wake of O’Donohue changed my experience of Advent, and Christmas. I waited reverently for the light.

Keats’s letters are filled with light, though his life was filled with pain and sorrow. In one of his letters is found a famous quote that states beautifully what I have long believed but am only recently beginning to really know: “I am certain of nothing, but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and the truth of Imagination.”

Early in the Letters, Keats in a letter to a friend he saw the day before refers to “your kindness.” A footnote tells us that the “kindness” was a sonnet the friend had left for him, and happily, the sonnet is reproduced in the footnote. It struck me when I read it that this sonnet about John Keats could have been written about John O’Donohue:

Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh gathered leaves,
Or white flowers pluck’d from some sweet lily bed;
They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed
The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eves
O’er the excited soul. Thy genius weaves
Songs that shall make the age be nature-led,
And win that coronal for thy young head
Which time’s strange hand of freshness ne’er bereaves.
Go on! And keep thee to thine own green way,
Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung;
Be thou companion of the summer day,
Roaming the fields and older woods among:
So shall thy Muse be ever in her May,
And thy luxuriant spirit ever young.

With that in mind, I felt compelled to write a sonnet for John O’Donohue myself. It’s rather less lyrical than one might hope, but perhaps it’s the thoughts that count:

O! John (as an American would say,
Though Father O’Donohue somehow sounds more right),
Your path is so like Keats’s own green way
Your words bring so much beauty, so much light.
You help us find the courage not to cower,
But stand and walk and know ourselves as free.
You show us that, like nature, we can flower
And through the light of Love can truly see.
Thank you for the guidance of your words
Thank you for the strength and for the vision
Divine imagination will be heard
As slots find grooves and we make our transitions.
May a world grown closer to being nature-led
Serve as the crowning garland for your noble head.

John O’Donohue will be conducting another workshop in Southbury, CT on the weekend of October 8 – 10, 2004 (Friday evening through Sunday morning).

I will certainly be there. I really hope you will join the weekend for what I’m sure will be another heart-soaring and spirit-opening event. www.miriamswell.org

All the best,

Sarah Rolph

<><><>

Wiggling Into the Universe