Tour Guide Kate Hennessy | Pilgrimage Tour

Kate Hennessy - Writer and Musician

Kate Hennessy is a writer and musician who has spent years on the road drawn again and again to the sacred sites of the world ranging from Tikal in Guatemala, to the Tomb of Mary in Turkey, and the Potala and Jokhang Temple in Lhasa. She has observed and participated in such ceremonies as the khora, the daily circumambulation of the Tibetan Buddhists, and Semana Santa, or Holy Week, in Antigua Guatemala. In the drive to understand her restlessness, she has done a variety of foolhardy things such as hitchhike alone through the heart of the Congo and walk 740 kilometers on el Camino de Santiago to visit the tomb of St. James in Santiago de Compostela in Spain.  She has only just begun to understand something of sacred landscape and of her role as a pilgrim. This, of course, remains an ongoing project.

Kate has worked in a variety of roles including camp counselor in the former Soviet Union, English teacher in a Guatemalan high school, computer skills teacher to Tibetan Buddhists nuns in India, as well as having lived and worked in New York City as a legal secretary, copy editor and business, educational and travel writer. She has been published in Doubletake Magazine and the Catholic Worker, and was included in an anthology of The Best American Travel Essays published by Houghton-Mifflin.

She is currently working on several projects—a retelling of the Irish creation myths as a companion book to the Fire Eye Suite, Garry Jones’s five-movement musical composition based on the Irish goddesses; and a biography and memoir of her grandmother, Dorothy Day, leading Catholic figure and candidate for sainthood.

Kate currently lives in Vermont where she was born and raised, though her heart remains in the West of Ireland where she lived for six years nourished by the thick Connemara air. She shares a home in Vermont with her husband, Garry Jones.