I went on retreat with a universal question: What is right for me at this time? Rilke’s direction has served me well before – live your questions now – and I discover that I am breathing into my question before I arrive at the destination, even though that phenomena was hidden from me until I was actually there. Stephanie reminded us how so often we are actors in each others story and what appears as moments of synchronicity have actually been prophesied. A truth right there … even the stones will shout out. Over recent months I have been touched by such kindness, generosity and compassion. As we sing in choir – my little cup runneth over!

So for retreat, I go to a foreign land, amongst strangers, and everything is preordained. Everything is waiting for me. The opening myth, one I am a novice studying, a poem recited that hangs on my wall, a story of a broken pot I have written about more than once and even on the same liturgical calendar day, a reading given to me by the teacher to read which I have read time and time again and the last line written on a torn from a paper towel placed centrally in the sight each time I sit at my desk.I am so astonished at the alignment, I laugh heartily and am warmed by the love that has obviously been holding me to get me to this place, at this time. It is, as the title of John O’Donohue’s book is named, “Eternal Echoes“.

“Embodied self compassion” is the theme of the retreat and the teachings are practical and potent for everyday application. Given my question and the experiences offered and met, I find living my question binds me to this sacred season – I am re-membering and in doing so I am re-membered.

What is right for me at this time? I am right to trust this. I am right to hear the eternal echo. I am right to come home to my-self and to call out to those parts of me in exile, wandering about in a forty year wilderness, waiting for the invitation to come home. Some parts in exile are finding their way stumbling in the dark, others racing towards ths light, one way or another, they are coming home, creatively, intuitively, by design and by accident, intentionally and unintentionally, in surprising and unsurprising ways.

On the in-between day of Easter Saturday, I took the track Pilgrims Path to the Sanctuary and came back the Goddess Way. Where the trek was slippery and indistinct on the way up, it was marked with female witnesses on the way down to the Centre – another homecoming.

This. is what is right for me at this time.

To reconnect.

To re-member.

To call home what has been exiled.

And then I bump into my Friend on the road to Emmaus, with my companions, and we are asked: “What’s been going on these past few days?” and I don’t recognise him straight away, but I do notice familiarity in my heart and gut. Then, I know who we met on the road.

We are all surrounded by signs and signals, confirming our decisions and pointing us in the direction that is right for us at this time. Opening our eyes is one step, going to your heart and gut for instruction might turn a different result to the one in your head. There is more than one way of knowing … and being known.

We have more than enough signs to know with our heads, hearts and souls, about what is right for us at this. If only we could, go on retreat as a species and embody self compassion? Until that days dawns though, it remains for us gifted with these times to follow O’Donohue’s instruction that: “The duty of privilege is absolute integrity.”

For after all is said, and after all is done: “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” – CS Lewis

This poem of David Whyte’s is a favourite and certainly sums up so much for me this Easter and I was grateful to be able to share it with others at Mana.

Everything is waiting for you – David Whyte

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.
As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witnesses
to the tiny transgressions.
To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
Surely even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice.

You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in your phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.
The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last.

All the birds and creatures of the world are utterably themselves.
Everything is waiting for you.

Special thanks to the Mana Retreat Centre, Retreat Directors Stephanie Dowrick and Joyce Kornblatt and my fellow retreat family, especially Wendy, Shasta and Marlene.

Mana Retreat Centre