When did you last let yourself be held?
Maybe your truest prayer right now is calling you to receive.
We find her at the edge of a driveway in the woods, just as my friend said we would, lone woman, mother before all mothers, Mary standing still, hands clasped at her heart from flowing robes, eyes closed as if in benediction or prayer.
My family and I are in the Catskills for a weekend getaway we take every year, and my mom, brother and I have driven to this home, guided by the directions of a friend who visited earlier this year, to find this statue of Mother Mary. A respite for pilgrims, seekers, believers, those who will pause, always, at beauty’s breast, linger where light softly pools. I imagine her, too, as a beacon and beckoning from chaos, hunger, the weight of moving through the unknown or trembling, grief-soaked, at the claws of some abyss.
She stands, visible from the road, flanked by prayer flags and adorned with offerings: crystals and stones, notes and trinkets, a bottle of tequila, a hawk’s feather at her nape, and around her neck, a layered canon of devotion.
We are silent when we get out of the car, carrying our own thoughts and intentions, though there are aching threads we share. We move at our own pace, find our own place of stillness. And as I gaze at Mary, see where others have marked her with their hurt, their reverence, their love, I place a nosegay at her feet, a mandarine near a prayer painted on paper.
But the words I imagined would come, the wash of tears, elude me. I am mute, despite the body’s wanting, the tongue’s itch. Despite my longing for a sediment shift in the spill of fevered invocation.
Though she is not one of the holy beings I tend to commune with or petition — as a non-practicing Catholic and self-proclaimed spiritual gypsy, I’m as likely to find God in the woods near my house or the eyes of a stranger as I am in a church sanctuary or religious text — I am drawn, when I encounter her, to the energy of the Divine Feminine and to her vast maternal heart, the love it took to bring a son into the world and watch him endure the unfathomable. Mary, whose name I hailed as a child on my knees, my mom often beside me, and again during Mass, and then a little later, with my fingers moving across a rosary of red, glass beads. Holy Mary, mother of God, rose without thorns, Queen of All Saints.
I want to pray to her. I even scrawl a few words in a book that invites visitors to leave their name, where they’re from and their supplication.
But how to pray for what each day refutes with its cruel cacophony, to lift a plea for peace from the folds of the monstrous, the indefensible? To call all mothers to the beheaded, the burned, the bombed? To invoke a fierce protection and courage by activating the mothering heart in all of us?
Words have been hard to come by most days. And when I struggle to find them, I sit instead with my heart. With the splintering. The heaviness. The grief. Though this, too, is sometimes challenging to access. But I am determined to stay soft, to allow the constant breaking as a refusal to surrender my humanity. This is why I also cultivate beauty, seek soulful connection, plant my feet on the Earth, throw my arms around every joy that comes. I want to feel it all, to honor my aliveness as a practice that allows me to also hold the relentless death and devastation of these times and the hard questions of how to show up and be part of the movement not only toward liberation but a radical, new world.
Yet as I stand, wordless, before Mother Mary, touching more numbness than fire, I realize what I need is to be held. That it is impossible to navigate these times without knowing what it’s like to be embraced by warmth, by care, by a solid, grounded love. And I know that Mary, and the land, beneath her — anointed by the many who have come before my family and by the intention of the homeowner who has gifted us this offering — can hold me.
I stop trying to find the words, dig for some meaningful utterance. I simply gaze upon her, feet planted on the ground, feeling into that rootedness. I breathe and let her compassion fill me, imagine her, Our Lady of the Roses, casting her tender eyes my way, placing a gentle hand upon my brow. Without strain or effort, I feel the grace of her presence, the depth of her heart. The holding that I need.
This, too, is a form of prayer, to let ourselves receive, and to melt into that yielding. Especially for those of us who are more comfortable giving, who find fulfillment in nurturing others but are often stingy in our own practices of letting in care. While we can be held by people — and I for one will always lean into a long, tight hug, an arm around my shoulder, a hand that squeezes mine — there is a sweetness in also being held by the land.
A short while after our time with Mary, my brother pulls into Zen Mountain Monastery. We are actually on our way to Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, the Tibetan Buddhist monastery, that sits atop a mountain just outside of the town of Woodstock. We have been there before — my mom and I even accidentally meditated with the monks one summer but that’s a story for another time — and enjoy basking in the peaceful energy, enfolded by the mountains, the greenery of the grounds. But we take a wrong turn and end up at Zen Mountain, where despite the retreat center being closed for the weekend, we are allowed in.
The same prayer finds me when we are directed, after leaving the zendo where meditation practice is held, to the side of the main building. There, an image of Jesus, arms wide open, is carved into the stonework. It’s a startling relief for a Zen monastery yet also strikingly beautiful. My breath catches, and something wings open in my chest when I round the corner to see him towering above my brother and me. I lean my back against the trunk of a white pine, feel its sturdy support, know, too, the grounding support of the Earth beneath my feet, and a washing over me as I stare up at the figure of Mary’s son. Quietly flooded by a sure and steady love. Held by tree and land, and a deep sense of the sacred.
This time, the tears do come as I steep in the energy of place. Lean more fully into receiving. Let any residual barriers to doing so fall away.
The horrors await me. Heartache is still a ravaging. Sorrows, for they are everywhere — mine and ours — will keep gnashing and glinting, naming me human again and again.
But for now, there is a peace. A hushed solace. An offering of love that has fortified and renewed me. And for that I carry gratitude, to be held and known, by the Earth, by the seen and unseen. To be marked by these moments where letting love in is a deepening and ripening of my own capacity to move as love through this long and harrowing dark.
Tips to resource yourself
Sometimes when we're grieving, we hold onto a single idea of what we believe support should look like.
But the truth is we are always in relationship to support...once we're willing to expand our perspective of what's available to us beyond the bounds of our human kin.
Here are some ways to resource yourself when you could use a little extra care:
Lie on the ground or sit with your feet firmly planted on the ground. Allow yourself to root into the Earth and feel into her unconditional support. Give your weight to gravity and let yourself be held.
Get close to water. This could be a body of water or a bowl of water if you aren't near a natural source. Ask the water to help you flow with your grief, to open you to your tears. Call on any ancestors, elders, teachers or deities that you associate with water. Ask for their support, their guidance, their love.
Take a walk. Notice how and where you are carrying your grief as you walk. What shifts in your body and your heart as you allow yourself to be companioned by the beauty, wonder and resilience of the natural world around you? What messages await from the plants, the trees, the rocks, the birds, the fungi, all that you see around you?
Summer Hearts: a new grief care offering
Once the weather heats up and the outdoors beckons, I often hear from grievers that they’d rather not think about their grief in the summertime. Yet the body still carries our grief. And whether we think about it or not, it will find a way to get our attention and express itself — and it will still be waiting for us once the season is over.
With graduation ceremonies, weddings, family reunions, vacations, holiday traditions and so many moments and celebrations that touch the ache of all we’re missing and longing for, the summer months can be tough on a broken heart.
This offering acknowledges that you may want to press pause on your grief while still offering access to care and support — at your own pace. Sign up to receive in your inbox 5 video teachings about grief, 5 poems with journaling prompts and practices, a downloadable digital journal, and 2 live calls on Monday, July 8, and Monday, Aug. 5, along with bonus invitations and assignments to support you on your journey.
Payments can be made here or via Venmo @Naila-Francis or Zelle or PayPal at naila.francis@gmail.com
Making space for complexity
How do we grieve the death of someone we had a complicated relationship with? What do we do when the love we feel for them is tangled up in the messy, the hard, the complex? Join me for a session to honor both/and. The love and the challenges of loving the difficult people who were in our lives can co-exist. In this writing workshop, we'll make time to explore our truth around these relationships, to honor our experience and create room for what we might struggle to say when others might insist we focus on the good or not speak ill of the dead. This session will include a brief guided meditation, writing prompts inspired by poems of grief and loss and time to reflect and share. Please bring a journal and a candle with you.
Payment can be made through Venmo @Naila-Francis, CashApp at $NailaFrancis (include email address for Venmo and CashApp in description), PayPal at naila.francis@gmail.com or via Stripe.
Beautiful post as always Naila. A balm on this gorgeous, grief-filled, lemon-yellow June day.