Cloister of the Heart : Monday mornings with Mary

Monday, July 1, 2013

Monday mornings with Mary - Inner Sanctuary

Perhaps nature senses the longing that is in us, the restlessness that never let us settle. She takes us into the tranquility of her stillness if we visit her. We slip into her quiet contemplation and inhabit for a while the depth of ancient belonging. Somehow we seem to become one with the rhythm of the universe. Our longing is purified and we gain strength to come back to life refreshed, and refine our ways of belonging in the world.

John O'Donohue - Eternal Echoes

Please join in Mornings with Mary with

Rebecca at Recuerda mi Corazon - links are available on my blog.

A blessed week to you!

4 comments:

Priti LisaJuly 1, 2013 at 3:55 PM
I can always count on you, Hettienne...
you always share the perfect passage for my day.
This quiet, thoughtful post
was just what I needed today.
♥♥
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J CJuly 1, 2013 at 5:21 PM
That paragraph by John O'Donohue is haunting and lovely. Reading it, the words slip in and out of one's spirit like a breeze blowing through tall grasses, bending them back, letting them go. It affected me that way and I felt it was beautiful. And your Mary, decorated with Mother Nature's offerings, is perfect. Have a wonderful day Hettienne.
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rebeccaJuly 1, 2013 at 6:22 PM
dear one,

due to the devastating tragedy in our home town i am honoring those brave souls who lost their lives working diligently to protect others. i invite you to link this beautiful offering next week when i will open my blog again to mornings with mary.
today is a time for prayers and tears.
thank you for understanding the enormity of our loss.
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Steve FinnellJuly 6, 2013 at 3:19 PM
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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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Monday, July 1, 2013

Monday mornings with Mary - Inner Sanctuary

4 comments:

Namaste

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