After I had hosted a few live watch parties on Zoom during the pandemic for Women + Wholeness features, I started telling people that the project was open to nominations. From the beginning, I had just wanted to sit with friends – friends who had quietly become leaders, holding medicine and mystery to what I saw and felt was needed for a better world. A friend bringing Ayurvedic wisdom and reminders of self-care and ritual through oil and food nourishment. A friend writing poetry and singing songs of life and story on the stage of the oldest church in the country. A friend tapping into the connection between the heart and the head and reestablishing, refreshing, and enlivening that connection daily with morning ritual, an altar of sanctuary, and sharing the foundation of that with psychiatry patients. A friend planting and tending seeds in her backyard with her children, and spreading those seeds out into community with her friends, speaking of food sovereignty, and a basic relationship, birthright, to the soil under our feed. Not only did I want to sit with these friends to soak in and learn more from their acquired knowledge and practices and see what I might incorporate, and weave into my own, I wanted them to be recognized for the importance in their work.
And, it has been meaningful to do this work. Back to the nominations. The first nomination I received was from my friend Sura Cox, who had spoken of a woman who prays the rosary. She kept mentioning that her practice wasn’t connected to organized religion, to dogma, to rigidity, but forgotten earth wisdom and inclusivity. She felt her spirit a match for the Women + Wholeness project. So, I called her after some initial resistance, but I caught her at a difficult time, she had beed diagnosed with cancer during the pandemic and was too weak to meet from chemo treatments, and too vulnerable to risk infection from the virus. But, she shared information about herself, a bit about her influences and communities, and assured me she would be back in touch when the time was right. In preparation for her interview, I began researching her background information which led me to find and read The Way of the Rose, The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. I listened to interviews from the authors before the book arrived, and once the book landed, I found myself falling into a hidden (to me) portal of history, mystery and prayer, seeking out a rosary of my own, and joining online circles of prayer and petitions for the hearts’ desire.
This is what Women + Wholeness is supposed to do, singularly connect us to what we need, to who we are becoming, and know that our tapestry is woven by and includes others if we listen. That each of us is a link to another, that we invisibly and deliberately lay stones in front of each others feet to take the next step, or become the net.
The key is listening and allowing, being receptive and trusting.
On January 20th, 2022, my grandmother’s birthday, which always feels holy to me and requests pause, I met up with Sabin Bailey at the Carmelite Monastery chapel in Santa Fe. The property of the monastery is the same that hosts the Santa Fe Photographic Workshop, the original invitation that brought me to Santa Fe and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. My dear friend Christine Grace Gonzales came as a partner in the direction and production of the project/ series, and this was our first interview together, bringing flowers and food and welcoming Sabin, our first nominee, to share a bit of herself with the project.
We feel so grateful and moved by the stories Sabin shared with us, and the resulting short video of the interview we will post on the website, but what she also gave us was a blessing for our work in the new year and the assurance of the healing and full aspect of our own hearts mingling with the world.
Thank you Sabin for blessing us, and for being a channel for Our Lady. You are in our minds and hearts our projects Fairy Godmother.
We hope you find something here amongst these women, with these women, that you need.
And, we welcome your nominations, hopefully we will conduct many more interviews with your engagement, that reveal a part of and a path to wholeness.