A Listening Pilgrimage
This concept of a Listening Pilgrimage has become one of my core spiritual practices. This poem tries to capture...
Our Longings as Echoes of Eden
There are some things you know you were born for. When you experience them, you feel sheltered like coming home to a soul-mate, you feel joy like sparks snapping out of a campfire, you feel satisfaction like sipping your favorite wine, and you feel peace like laying on a green lawn staring at the clouds. A smile draws up from your soul, breaks across your face, and you relax into yourself.
These living sacred experiences are conceived from our deepest longings. We are meant to live into them because they are the true fruit of our soul, unfolding into time and space from the fertile soil of who we truly are. We know that to truly thrive we must be restored to our deepest longings. Yet, giving voice and shape to our intimate yearnings is one of the most vulnerable things we can do. Our hidden longings exist, like shadows, in the corners of our lives. It takes great courage to uncover them.
“Longing is the voice of our souls calling us to live to the full the one life that we have been given.”
John O’Donohue
The presence and expression of the deepest yearnings, longings, dreams, and visions of our soul give form to our True Essence. What wells up from the deepest place within us is of God and is home to our True Self. These twinges of longing surface from the depth of our soul and offer faint echoes of our original home. Metaphorically, I like to call them “Echoes of Eden.” We need to listen for these Echoes of Eden in our own souls if we are to live our true lives fully in this world.
So, we wonder: how can I be restored to the deepest longings of my soul? How can my yearnings find hopeful expression in my life? Can I risk voicing my yearning for beauty, harmony, intimacy, and union? Learning to listen to the Echoes of Eden in our souls takes immense courage because we lose our ego selves along the way. The voices of our culture, our families of origin, our religious upbringing and our personal experiences are loud. Listening to the voice of our souls requires the courage to slow down, be still, and listen. Yet, if we are determined to listen to the longings of our hearts, these Echoes of Eden will point us to a more beautiful, whole way of living in harmony with ourselves and other living beings. We come from the womb of Eden, a place of deep shalom. We yearn to live in tune with the music echoing across our universe from the Divine heart of Love.
Echoes of Eden Poetic Journal
This poetic journal is dedicated to all spiritual pilgrims who dare allow themselves the luxury and burden of longing for the Divine. Inviting readers into her unique personal story, Miriam unveils, with tender beauty, universal human longings for belonging, beauty, wholeness, love and delight. Using Eden as a metaphor for home, she draws the reader into an intimate exploration of human longing. These longings, she contends, are echoes that lead us along the inner landscape of our souls to the freedom of our True Selves in union with Divine Love. In a world where humans are fractured from each other and the natural world, she offers hauntingly beautiful poems, awakening the hope that listening to these echoes in our soul will cultivate more thriving lives and flourishing landscapes in our world. Through this poetic journal, as well as retreats in Kenya by the same name, she invites spiritual seekers to explore the rugged intimacy of their inner landscape while extending a hand of healing to the earth.
