Cloister of the Heart : A Virgin a Day

Thursday, December 1, 2011

A Virgin a Day

From today, the first of December till Mary's Holy Day, the twelfth, I will be sharing Her with you as part of Rebecca's A Virgin a Day at Recuerda Mi Corazon. If you want to join in, the link is here on my blog and her invitation is below.

Ave Maria

Mary, Maryam, Maria, Mares

Holy Woman

So much more

Than a head bowed down

Arrow fierce and fast

Directed at the heart

No sin of error here

Cloak of power

All-embracingly blue

Heart on fire

Flowing from the sacred well

Eternally walking on the bed of coals

You seduce me into dancing in the flames

Eyes blinded

Only the heart sees

And hears

The howling winds of compassion

Screaming through my ribcage

Cracked open

Finger by finger

Pomegranate juice flowing in my veins

Persephone’s ashes

Caked with the tears of Demeter

Entangled in the hair of Medusa

I follow where you lead

The perfume of your feet

The guiding light my holy woman

Sacred Am I

Ave Maria

You can find Recuerda Mi Corazon here http://corazon.typepad.com/recuerda_mi_corazon/2011/11/a-virgin-a-day.html and here is Rebecca's beautiful invitation :

each year beginning december 1,

i post "a virgin a day" every day until december 12,

mary's feast day.

today i am

calling all virgins...

enchanting, traditional, contemporary,

exotic, edgy, campy, irreverent, irresistible,

unusual, joyful, rapturous, lovely,

glorious, ordinary, astounding,

simply

bring her on!

i hope you will join me in a pilgrimage of marys.

feel free to re-post this invitation on your blog,

and link back to

recuerda mi corazon.

as december grows busier we will

quietly greet the new day one mary at a time.

mr. linky will be here to gather all the virgin sightings.

just add your name and direct link back to your virgin

so we can effortlessly share the divine.

***

(here's the virgin a day participation button linked to this post)

A Virgin A Day

1 comment:

Queenie BelieveDecember 1, 2011 at 7:29 PM
What a beautiful way to honor Mary in blogland. I look forward to all the posts!
Have a great day,
Always, Queenie
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My life as a Pilgrim to sacred places

Pilgrimage and sacred ritual is my foremost spiritual practise. Raised Dutch Reformed Protestant, the rich lustre of sacred and holy places offered a well of inspiration for my parched soul. My travels have taken me to many different religions, cultures and traditions. You will see on the internet that I have written on many aspects of the spiritual journey. Until I came into contact with the mystical side of Christianity. My first ritual I attended was the festival of Archangel Michael in Mont Sant'Angelo in Italy, then visiting Padre Pio. Then followed walking the pilgrimage of Bridgid, the sacred well and labyrinth in Kildare, Ireland. And that is when my art appeared in the form of paintings. Ritual grounded in the knowing of the unconscious, awakens us from the dream of habitual seeing and thinking. The conscious mind lacks the ability or maybe the neural pathway to communicate the new-found wisdom intellectually, and thus the expression through art steps in. Well, that is only my experience and understanding, of course. But I had not been an artist till I participated in sacred ritual.

My stay at Lourdes and participating in the rituals daily, turned me into a full time artist.

When one participates in a ritual (probably any ritual, but when you regard it as sacred, you add a certain 'light' to it) you are transported into a different time and space : colors are different; the light is different; everything has meaning and the ordinary become extra-ordinary. My art novena for Lourdes in particular, highlights my statement that our lives are the altar to the Divine and I strive to capture that numinosity of the sacred ritual in my photographs and altars. I only started creating sacred altars on my return from Lourdes. These small shadowboxes are vignettes, a moment in time in the life of ordinary human beings, lifted out of the mundane into the numinous, merely by seeing life as sacred.

Wisdom of Oscar Wilde

“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"In an old song the Mother sings: 'My sleeping is my dreaming, my dreaming is my thinking, my thinking is my wisdom.' She is the bed we are born in, in which we sleep and dream, where we are healed, love and die. In her wisdom we remember day's broken images and carry them down into dreams where their motions roll into shadows and root, growing into stories." ~Meinrad Craighead

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. ~Rumi

I am the mother of fair love and of respect and of knowledge and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth; in me is all hope of life and of virtue - Ecclesiasticus 24:24.

OPEN FLOWER

Near your breastbone there is an
Open Flower.
Drink the honey that is all around that flower.
Waves are coming in:
There is so much magnificence near the ocean!
Listen: Sound of big seashells!
Sound of bells!
Kabir says: Friend, listen this is what I have to say:
The guest I love is inside me!
~Kabir

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Thursday, December 1, 2011

A Virgin a Day

1 comment:

Namaste

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