Today’s piece is long….after a long journal about the pink full moon and an oracle card pull and fours hours of sleep in a row (!) and a watching the Artemis II blast off into space. This is all real.
Miraculous Medal
“Those are the graces for which people forget to ask”…said Mary (Mother of Jesus) to Catherine Labouré, when she (Catherine) had a vision of Mary’s palms streaming light from her palms. Some of the rays did not touch the earth. The Divine Feminine Oracle Deck by Meggan Watterson
I asked for help twice in the last four days. Asking for help is not really my thing. I’m good at doing it All. I’m a miracle manager, a control-connoisseur, a hereditary helper for love – and o what love I give to those I love…o, o, o. I’ve been a mother for lifetimes and for lifetimes I’m mothering my way to loving myself. The miracle of this grace lives in asking for help. Help! I can’t. I can’t. Mother Mary came to me by way of Catherine Labouré (patroness saint of miraculous healing) by way of the oracle deck by way of the pink full moon by way of April’s fools and by way of the third chakra solar plexus free will haunting the hollow under my ribs. Alignments streaming from Mary’s open palms lighting my selves to my self (and even in writing about the grace of asking for help, I stop to answer a text from my daughter because my daughter, my son, the pup who has to pee) and yet I close my heart to feeling Mary’s pain witnessing her only son’s brutal violent death…creating a new blue…Mary’s Blue tears weeping into the bloodied dirt of hatred…watering it with her suffering and growing miracles of grace of resurrection of acceptance that a mother’s love is outrageously ragefully radically unconditionally infinitely divinely abundant so how do I ask for help with Mary’s Blue in my tearstream? I ordered Catherine’s miraculous medal from Amazon and let the guilt of ordering a sacred totem from a beast sink to my calves and cramp. I asked for help because I needed sleep because my bones were slipping out of my pores because I couldn’t see straight because I missed my bed my pillow the fan blowing into dreamless sleep. I asked for help because I was depleted and desperate and delirious with exertion for loving the All outside my body…and o, o, o the alignment of graceful bravery palm-pouring over me feels profound and, listen, I let a miracle crawl into my bones and heal me o, o, o the miracle of Mary’s Blue marinates me into receivership of divine rescue and o, o, o it’s terrifying but I’m getting it in the way that getting it is only possible by letting it go, o, o, o not of my dignity or integrity or even my want (need) to love All extraordinarily but to love the healing results of post-help humility and the space it creates for the collaboration of blissful boundaries and the shameless intervention of spirit tonguing my tongue to speak. I asked for help twice in the last four days and I will ask for help again because my daughter, my son, the pup who has to pee because my husband my friends my coven my novel because me because yes I struggle with the preciousness of time at the same time that I believe All is timeless and because being alive in the paradox of being in a body that dies (violently, brutally) is precisely why I make time to write poetry a nourishment that nullifies the necessity for suffering and sanctifies my ebbing capacity to mother me to palm-out in-pour my love gracefully into me. Last night I dreamt I was drowning. I awoke gasping, the pup’s paw on my jugular tenderly like a gold Mary medal resting between thumps of grace or miracles or both.
VANESSA SHIELDS 