Today, as I begin a month of rest following my time of bringing forth Mirari: The Way of the Marys, I share with you my morning with Holy Mary. She and I speak of life in time, COVID-19, isolation, and nurture. (I will be unavailable until March 11, 2021.)

 

Dear Mary,

I have given my first expression to Mirari, in an interview with Patricia Pearce.[1] Together, it was effortless. Now I am ready, after a year of bringing this first book to completion, to rest before starting again with the manifestation of our next offering.[2]

My tired eyes are comforted by a restful winter scene. The red, white, and blue birdhouse barely shows its color. All is dim. The cabin’s red roof is uniformly glazed with snow, her logs indistinct within darkness. The ground is silver-white, the trees a haunting black, the sky taking on just a hint of morning shadow. While it is a world of contrast, nothing is waving its arms asking for attention. Despite sound, the world is quiet. The furnace hums.

And so, now, I will rest. What will that look like?

My old cat Simeon is behind the sunroom’s closed door, and I am just outside of it, sitting at the window looking out. I pray that I am making little enough noise that he doesn’t begin to cry to get out. He’s already been fed, and the little room is warm. I so love sitting undisturbed in the dark before the light, even when it’s too icy and cold to go to the cabin.

Mary, do you have anything to say about my rest in this time ahead?

Dear One, you can feel our time coming to a close and the opening of a time where your own voice is needed. This is as it was always meant to be. Your voice, like mine, is for this time.

The feminine, rising to ascendency like the slow rising of the day, will be my time, too. Not as the Mary I was but as the Mary I am in this time, and the Mary I am in you, and each, through union.

Our dialogues, occurring within Christ Consciousness,[3] reveal our joint need to be, to know, and to express . . . for the cause of the Living. This way—attained through relationship, is the only way you truly live—as your Self.

I can feel that I am coming to know this in a deeper way, even while I still find it almost impossible to express.

 

Here, I begin to see reflections, in the window before me, of the cars going by out front. It is nearing seven o’clock, and people who still “go” to work are beginning their days.

How life has changed for them in the year past! How few, as the protection from COVID began, thought that it would continue into 2021. I often wonder what Henry, who turned fourteen yesterday, will remember of these days when he is a man.

Once, as COVID-19 started, I imagined compiling my experience as associated with the pandemic and the changes arising from it.  I suppose our second book reflects that to some degree, but not as “the time of COVID” sitting off by itself, and itself a subject. My writing has been of my time with you, Mary.

 

The other day, as I was thinking of how much I’ve always liked Lebanese food, I wondered for the first time, if it may have been because it is so akin to what was eaten in your time. The unique spices like zaatar and cumin. The flat bread. The lamb. The Easter cookies that taste ancient with the seed of mahlab. I learned things from my mother-in-law Katie, about how the cooks from different villages made their dishes. She told me that in her village, tabouli was made with cabbage rather than parsley. I asked her, “Why?” and she said, “Because that was what we had.” I imagine hers (or her parent’s lives) as a way lived closer to your way, Mary.

Before Katie died, I was in my time of Jesus. Now, because of you, I think more of the ways of women, and see how they endure in their own manner. Women’s words, tell of food, spices, the land, literal seeds, and seeds of memory.

I’m finding cause for enduring hope now. I feel that, as the feminine is embraced, more people will carry on in new ways, taking care of one another. We could find a world in a village and a village in a world.

 

At 7:21 the day is as white as it was dark an hour ago. It is still and restful. This may be all I need to “rest,” to have my morning time unassailed by thoughts of things to be done. My morning time reserved for me and you.

 

It was the way of women in my time, too, Mari, to do this early rising. To speak to our God before anyone else. To commune with the land before the time of work and talk began. To pray for peace and for each other, yes, but also to be together in the quiet before the needed acts of life in form began. 

The story of Martha and Miriam[4] has contrasted the way of the doer who cannot stop, and the way of the woman who could. Being a “doer” constantly, takes away—even your womanhood. It takes away men’s manhood.

The isolation of COVID-19 will be salvific to many, and not only due to the isolation slowing the spread of the disease. It has, to a great extent brought “world unity” and “local unity” together, as the common resolve to care for one’s own, within one’s own boundaries, even while being connected to and caring for all. From world unity, along with clear boundaries, arises the sense within each, of this same potentiality with one’s Self, and of the peace that will come of it.

Imagine those of your time who take themselves away, as for retreats, or solitary living. They have not been seen, or seen themselves, as acting out of self-protection, or protection of the sacred. But we use the word “protection” as safe shelter, rather than as defense. We protect the uniqueness and distinction of each living Holy One. This is also what your morning time is. You are sheltering the sacred distinction in your Self.

Rest from constant, outward, doing—from being inundated with countless calls to multiple matters, significant and insignificant both, are incessant intrusions of one’s space and thus of spaciousness. And few are urgent.

In times of war, riots, calamities—that is different. But every day should not ring in such a cacophony of seemingly urgent demands. This time has come of your own making and can be undone by your own undoing.

While this mandated isolation of COVID-19 is as irritating to some as it is nurturing to others, for many it has, and for some still will, change over time. . . and change the way of time. The same is true of the grief being felt, as change always includes grief. The loss of life that has been so tremendous, goes ahead of those lives left behind. Many left behind suffer not only their loss of relationship, but their inability to mourn in the way they would desire. In this, their appreciation for the way of grief has begun to grow.

And so, here we speak of those who will find nurture, and who will begin to renew themselves, by embracing time “for” themselves. In the nurturing of the quiet self, you can see the woman with the faraway look, stroking her swollen belly. She has been taken out of time and is being a holy two. So will it be for many who do not know it, but are in the midst of preparing to birth themselves anew.

The looking back on what was, with more than nostalgia, and seeing ahead with more than vision, has begun.

 

For humankind to pass out of this survival instinct, the Mother laws of care and nurture—given to all—must come into their time of fullness. This is part of what can create a new age and make way for The New.[5]

 

We embrace those ready to become spacious, and nurture them back to Mirari.

 

Mirari is that wonder which is the re-discovery of Self, of the birth, and the creation, of The New.[6]

 

Envisioning . . . will increasingly join with what you observe until your vision is released from old patterns and guides you more truly. [7]

 

 

[1] See Center for Contemporary Mysticism, https://contermporarymysticism.or/, Video: https://contemporarymysticism.org/media/video-Mari-Perron-210207-ZOOM.asp  Patricia Pearce, Interviewer, Joe Irwin, Host

[2] The second book of the Mary trilogy has been named Memoria: The Way of the Marys

[3] Christ-consciousness . . . is both the feminine and masculine, the “identity” of God, or in other words, the All of All given an identity. ACOL Dialogues, Day:17.2

[4] Miriam of Magdala, also referred to as Mary Magdalene.

[5] Mirari: The Way of the Marys, p. 29

[6] Mirari: The Way of the Marys, p. 279

[7] ACOL Dialogues, D:7.16