For Our Lady of the Sacred Heart on Her feast day, May 30, 2024 (WC)

 

(Wendy Cabell, May 30, 2024, feast day of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart (her shrine in Mexico alone (begun in 1966) brings “thousands of cures performed through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin”; see also May 25, May 31 and the last Saturday in May), Saint Dymphna, Saint Emmelia (Married to Saint Basil the Elder; mother of Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory Nyssen, Saint Peter of Sebaste, and Saint Macrina the Younger), Saint Joan of Arc, Saint Matiya Mulumba, and Blessed Marie-Céline of the Presentation (Bordeaux). On Jewish Calender today is Shabbat Commanded (1313 BC). (Also eve of the Visitation, the Queenship of Mary, Mary Mediatrix of All Graces, Our Lady of Altagracia de los Guaiqueríes, Our Lady of Banneux, and on Jewish calendar Water from a Rock at Rephidim (1313 BC)—wow!). Image from here.)

For Our Lady of the Sacred Heart on Her feast day, May 30, 2024

that freshman year in college, that Orthodox living room:

door’s Mezuzah to kiss, Shabbas candles in wait, everywhere the sacred books —

this is true home!, heart says. 

*From prompt: Write down a list of images that haunt you (in either a negative or positive sense), choose one to expand on as long as like, then boil it down into 2 - 5 lines. Poem read for inspiration is “A Green Crab’s Shell” by Mark Doty. FromTresha Faye Haefner (of Poetry Salon)’s Thursday Generative Writing class, May 30, 2024.

From the Rock (WC)

 

(Wendy Cabell, May 19, 2024, Pentecost (Catholic), Sunday of the Holy Myrrhbearing Women with the Noble Joseph (Eastern Orthodox), feastday of the Inexhaustible Cup Icon of the Mother of God (old calendar), and Entrance of Saint Nino (Nina) the Enlightener into Georgia. Image by Mary Jane Miller (such beautiful work!) from here.

From the Rock

of frozen fear, darting 

eyes –- breath it swoops, a whoosh 

       to where the warm pollen lies

      to metamorphacize -- melt through

             to inner sweetness

         

*From prompt: List (using both images and sensory/body cues) what comes when you think of working, then what comes when you think of resting, then let these evolve into a poem/piece. [More detail on evoking what it means to rest: "How do you tend your heart and nourish your body?  How do you fill yourself up, when your well is dry? What helps you sink into spaciousness?  What gets in the way? Maybe you’ll write about a moment or a memory when you felt yourself gathered into gentleness or ease.  How do you know it, in your body or your mind?  Are there things that shift in the way you perceive the world?  In the way you see or feel or listen?] From Rabbi Julia Watts Belser's Disability Wisdom and the Subversive Power of Radical Rest (Lilith Creative Writing Workshop), May 17, 2023.