Connemara Illuminated (new poetry video) ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
Connemara Illuminated A poem is being scribed this morning across the thick brown bog and over the gashed granite folds of mountain, written in spires of gold descending from the wide bowl of sky across the breathing heather. You have to pause to read it, long enough to hear beneath the relentless moan of wind […]
St. Teresa’s Ecstasy (new poem video) ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, To continue celebrating the upcoming release of my poetry collection Dreaming of Stones, I have another poem video for you this week. This poem, titled St. Teresa’s Ecstasy, was inspired by the statue created by Bernini which depicts a moment she describes in her autobiography of mystical communion. The poem […]
Poetry and the Sacred (new videos and featured poet series) ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, In celebration of publishing my new collection of poems, Dreaming of Stones, we are delighted to be working with local video production company Morgan Creative to launch a series of poetry videos. I have two to share with you today: First, enjoy this one-minute book trailer they created with gorgeous images from […]
Love and Radical Hospitality ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, Valentine’s Day is coming, which for many of us is a holiday that only serves to make us feel inadequate, as all highly commercialized things do. And yet the message of love is worth repeating if we can look beneath the chocolate hearts and flowers and the expectation that we all […]
The Feast of Brigid and Imbolc ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
St. Brigid at the Market I saw her in the market backlit in the doorway from the evening sun, blue cloak ripples like water dandelions and primrose in her hand. Passersby brush past this moment of light and song in a rush to get shoes off and dinner on, just another day of traffic, bills, […]
8 Practices of a Good Pilgrimage ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, The value of travel was ingrained in me from a young age. When I was growing up in New York City my father worked for the United Nations, and we had the privilege of traveling back to Austria, where he was from, as well as other European countries and once […]
The Sacred Gifts of Poetry ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
Dreaming of Stones In the world before waking I meet a winged one, feathered, untethered, who presses in my palm three precious stones, like St. Ita in her dream, but similarities end there, her with saintliness and certainty, me asking questions in the dark. All I know is I am not crafted from patience of […]