The Virgin of Guadalupe

The Mother I most often carry with me everywhere is the woodswoman La Nuestra Senora, Our Lady Guadalupe, she whose mantle is fashioned of moss from the north side of trees at sunset, she who has star shards caught in her wild silver hair. Her gown is soft, coarse-woven cloth with the thorns and weed seeds and petals of wild roses caught in it.

She has dirty hands from growing things earthy, and from her day and night work alongside her hard-working sons and daughters, their children, their elders, all.

La Guadalupe is no symmetrical thing with palms equally outstretched and frozen in time.

She is ever in motion.

If there is emotion, she is there.

If there is commotion, she is there.

If there is elation, she is there.

Impatience, she is there.

Fatigue, she is there.

Fear, unrest, sorrow,

Beauty, inspiration,

She is there.

And she is demure in a sense, yes, but different from those who would fade her essence into an anemia: Yes, she is demure as in demurring, that is, refusing to be contained and made small.

And she is calm, yes, but not without will to rise again and again. Instead, yes, she is calm as the mighty ocean is calm as it moves in enormous troughs and pinnacles, its huge waves like a heartbeat: easy, intentional, muscular.

And she is pure, yes, but not as in never going dark, never having doubt, never taking a wrong turn for a time, but rather pure, yes, as a gemstone is cut into a hundred sparkling facets - that kind of pure, meaning gem-cut by travail, adventure, and challenge — and yet fully without a streak of dead glass in any facet. ... (pp. 17-18)

The Memorae

Very often I am asked how a soul just coming to truly be with Our Lady might think about Maria, Nuestra Madre Grande. I say:

How to comprehend her, be close to her.

The exotic locale is not necessary to apprehend her. She is found in a shard of glass, in a broken curb, in a hurt heart, and in any soul knowing or unknowing, yet crazy in love with the mysteries, with the divine spark, the creative fire — and not quite so in love with mundane and petty challenges only.

Think of her not in the ways you've been told/sold.

Rather, seek her with your own eyes without blinders

and your own heart without shutters.

Look low instead of high.

Look right under your nose.

She comes in many guises and disguises.

Hidden, right out in the open.

And you will know her immediately by her immaculate

and undivided heart for humanity.

This is the Guadalupe I think you know of, or sense, or want to know, or are very close to for years now. Our Lady is joy-centric and sorrow-mending. She is one who is present in every way. In so understanding one's own pull to the Holy Woman, thus do we untie the Strong Woman.

Here, please allow me to pray strength into your hands and heart — and inspiration and daring — and fire — to lift the Great Woman away from whichever Lilliputians have tied her down into more manageable form.

No matter which dissertation or diminution she has been tied down by, she is greater than any Lilliputian mind by far. (p. 21)

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The Virgin of Guadalupe as presented by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés