Howling Back/Final wth intro

Today marks the one-year anniversary of an extraordinary experience I had in Ireland—an experience that opened something ancient, sacred, and healing within me. It is also another kind of anniversary: a reminder that our times of suffering, our revisiting of old fears, and our courage to face and overcome trauma can become the very doorway that leads us forward, back to ourselves, and deeper into our true journey in this life. I invite you to read my story, Howling Back..

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Howling Back

By Sheryl Aronson

The moment I stepped onto the castle grounds, I knew I had not come to admire tapestries or wander grand rooms with polished floors. My friends from the Irish writing retreat gathered near the entrance, laughing and talking over one another, eager to begin the tour. But beneath their voices, beneath the shuffle of shoes and the distant creak of the old doors, another sound reached me. The wind was calling my name. Stay outside, it whispered. Do not go into the castle. Follow my lead.

I slipped away from the group with my camera in hand and entered the gardens. They opened before me in a rush of color: flowers thick with rain, glossy leaves bending under the mist, stone sculptures waiting like silent witnesses on benches and along the path. I photographed everything I could, not because I wanted souvenirs, but because each flash felt like proof that I was awake inside some ancient dream.

Then the voice sharpened. Leave the garden now.

I found the gate, lifted the latch, and began climbing the stone steps beyond it. Behind me, the castle and its civilized promises fell away. Ahead, the hillside rose into mist. The wind whipped at my coat; rain gathered in the air; below me, cold dark water threaded past the castle and disappeared into the distance. I felt as if I had crossed out of ordinary Ireland and into a country with no map.

At the top, my feet met the forest floor, and something inside me broke open. I began to sob—not from fear, but from recognition. The trees, the lake, the wild mountains, the rain on my face: all of it seemed to know the part of me I had nearly lost.

Twenty-four years earlier, breast cancer had pulled me through a darkness I thought would never end. For twelve of those years, I felt sealed away from myself, as if every earthly thing—peace, family, sanity, even my own soul—had been nailed shut inside a coffin. Yet here I was, alive in my seventies, standing in an Irish forest while the wind insisted that a cycle had closed.

I sang into the weather the words I had carried like a promise: “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.” The prayer rose from me and vanished into the storm, and the storm answered with a long, low howl.

More surprises ahead, the wind whispered. Follow the path.

Around the bend, three great boulders sat enclosed by trees. The middle one waited like a throne. When I lowered myself onto its cold marble surface, the air changed. Silence gathered. The stone beneath me rocked and rolled gently, as though the earth itself had become a boat carrying me somewhere beyond sight.

With my eyes closed, I heard the deep pockets of soil pulsing like a hidden heart. My wild spirit rose up inside me and cried; I am home. I am one with these black waters, these open spaces, these unseen beings that move through the green world. Then a figure appeared across the threshold of the Otherworld, dressed in a red robe and standing in a doorway of light. I invited him closer, but he did not move. He did not need to. Our gazes met across that fairyland road, and I understood the message before the words came. Welcome back to your roots. Welcome home to this Irish forest.

The wind rose again, no longer pulling me forward but circling me like a blessing. I thought of every year I had survived, every silence I had endured, every door I believed had closed forever. Now another door had opened—not in the castle, but in me. Yet the forest was not finished speaking. Before I sat upon the rock throne that carried me toward the Otherworld, the voice had given one more instruction: Take a picture of the tree stump that sat before it. I had obeyed without questioning, just as I had obeyed earlier in the garden, when something urged me to photograph a statue of a stag sitting quietly on a bench, waiting as if it had known I would come.

Only later, back in my room, did I understand. In the photograph of the stump, hidden in the grain and shadow, was the unmistakable face of a stag. From garden to forest, from statue to spirit, it had been there all along: the ancient guide between worlds, the sacred bridge between the life I had known and the life still calling me forward. The wind howled my name, the stag watched from the threshold, and at last—with my whole life behind me and a new one before me—I howled back. A year has passed since that adventure in the Irish forest, and today I sit in my room on the eve of surgery once again—this time for breast cancer inside my left breast—contemplating the long journey that began not only in 2003, but perhaps even earlier, in August of 1987, on the eve of the Harmonic Convergence.

That summer, I had a prophetic dream that God was taking everything away from me. I did not understand it then. I only knew the terror of it. And God did take everything away from me: my health, my family, my mental health, my ability to know who Sheryl truly was. In 2003, when I first received the news of breast cancer, I sat inside that darkness without understanding the message hidden inside it. I lived what I would later write in my memoir as the feeling of passing myself down to the grave.

This past August, 2026, when I returned to Onset, Massachusetts—the place where that dream had unfolded—I felt another cycle closing. It was a place I had loved as a little girl, a place filled with beautiful memories, and yet it held the beginning of a mystery I had spent my life trying to understand.

Now, one year after that mystical experience in the Irish forest, I can see the pattern with a humility that leaves me in awe. We are always being spoken to. We are always being encouraged and guided, even when we cannot understand the language of events.

Time is not only past, present, and future moving in a line. Sometimes it is all one time, all happening at once, showing us the shape of our spiritual/psychological journey and how we are meant to be of service in the world.

TA I bring all of this—the darkness, the pain, the suffering, the mystery, the survival—into my work as a therapist. I help my clients find their own beauty and their own path through suffering, so they may become, fully and uniquely, who they are meant to be in this world. Because even when all we can feel is fear, even when darkness seems to be the only truth, there is still strength, courage, and wisdom waiting to rise within us. And bring us into the light. All is well. All will be well. All is well. I howl back my name because we all must howl our names. Inside that howl lives everything it means to be human: the sadness, the pain, the suffering, the joy, the delight, the tears, the laughter, the desperate cry of Why me? and the sacred answer: Because you are a unique and blessed creature here on earth. That is the true howl. That is the name we are each called to remember.