Cloister of the Heart : Mondays with Mary Love perseveres

Monday, September 30, 2013

Mondays with Mary Love perseveres

I am writing to you from the Kruger National Park. One of the biggest natural conservation areas in Africa with an abundance of wild life, including the Big Five and amazing bird life!

I am blogging from my phone with very little internet coverage, so it is quite an undertaking!!

It is spring here in the Lowveld of South Africa and we had some summer rains, but the weather is clearing up with lovely sunny skies.

The one message I noticed everywhere in nature today is that growth cannot be thwarted when it is filled with the sap of joy and sheer abundance and surrender to life : no getting stuck in worrying over the little details!!

Follow your heart and do not lose your passion when you hit a big rock - look at these trees - they all grow at a picnic spot we stopped at today for a hot cup of camping coffee!!

Sometimes we are faced with disapproval of others or ignorance of our heart's desire and how we view the world and this may make us feel tempted to give up on chasing the rainbow - but Mary's message is no rock is too hard for the Love tree!

i added a wildlife picture or two for you!

p.s. I could not figure out how to get the pictures in the right sequence

I am sharing with Rebecca at Mornings with Mary

3 comments:

Queenie BelieveSeptember 30, 2013 at 8:15 PM
Beautiful post, I reminder I needed today,thank you.
Lovely photos, such magestic beauty.
Have a great day.
Always, Queenie
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J CSeptember 30, 2013 at 10:13 PM
Your post, and the words to live by in the previous post, have made my day. I must have needed this reminder, for I felt myself falling but now I can grab my passion once again and carry on. Thanks, girl!!
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GlorV1October 1, 2013 at 12:48 AM
Hettienne, I just love your blog so much. The colors just grab me. What wonderful photos of all things beautiful. Thank you. Loved your post. Thanks.
gloria
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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, September 30, 2013

Mondays with Mary Love perseveres

3 comments:

Namaste

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