One morning I found myself walking, bathed in another shining day of light — so often to be had on this present journey in Brazil! There was so much light that the shadows, in contrast, appeared black and chasmic.
It Was There, In The Shadows, That I Came Upon A Sacred Black Madonna Shrine. And Then Came The Feeling That I Was The One Who Had Been Found.
I was deeply touched by the significance of the moment. I had been moving through the deep transitions of an aging woman in a world where both men and women are for the most part commercially and societally sutured to identities not of our own making.
On that day I found myself held in grace, having come through and onto the other side — arriving with a breath of refreshment after a singularly profound threshold of life. So much I had been holding for the last few years had finally been released.
I labored through the unfolding not by will, but by surrender — by earthing, by what might be called a deeply conscious embodiment. What I once called choice revealed itself instead as inevitability, and what I had been carrying began, slowly, to become soluble.
Come Grace
Come — the grace of making peace with questions of having succeeded or failed in life.
Come the making of peace with regret, with ruin.
Come the grace of settling with that “unfulfilled life,” whose endeavors, by natural law, have no more fuel.
So She Comes, Then, To Render Such Matters Superfluous.
Everyone Arrives At This Threshold In Their Own Way, And Many Do Not Cross It, For Without Earthing There Is Only Dead Weight. Different Roads. Same Collapse.
When it comes, it does so without schemes or bargains in hand. For the mind, it arrives as a re-solution — not an answer, but a dissolving: an alchemical power that alters the chemistry of holding, honors what has been lived, and steadies the body-mind for the thresholds still ahead.
It is here that the Black Madonna makes sense to me — not as an historical figure, nor as doctrine, but as an interior presence. She is not the one who rescues us from the wrestle, but the one who holds it. The one who stays when will has burned through itself, when striving has no more fuel, when the burden can no longer be carried by effort alone.
She is an internal faculty of strength and power, yes — but not the kind that announces itself. She holds the pain of the wrestle. She is the fire and the ash, and the long patience required when all familiar measures of success, worth, and promise have fallen away. She is present in those moments when all seems lost, not to offer consolation, but to remain
I Find Myself Given Over To Wonder At Those For Whom She Was Most Dear.
What I wonder doesn’t entirely make sense — though perhaps it isn’t meant to. That those who came to her would not have asked her for rescue, or for things. Deities are so often approached that way. And yet, standing at the shrine, I could see that this was unmistakably a place of offering. Not bargaining. Not petition. Offering.
Perhaps They Came Not To Be Saved, But To Have A Moment Away From The Need To Be Saved.
A place where the burden could be set down without explanation
Where no answer was required
Where presence itself was enough as it has always been
