So here’s the back story on this painting. It’s based on a photo I took of a baby great tailed grackle. Great tailed grackles are omni-present here around my gardens. Adult male grackles are imposing, large, oilslick shiny black, and incredibly noisy. The only difference between males and females is their color but the females have an equally loud attitude. They have a vast vocubulary of trills and shrill calls that loop and circle around the grandmother tree in the Fairy Garden and bounce across the rooftops. They are often confused with crows or birds from the corvid family, but no, grackles couldn’t care less who you think they are or what you think about the way they act. They’re part overbearing bully (toward smaller birds and creatures) and part badass heroes of giving a flying f***. I love them.

They like to pose like the divas they are on high prominent places around my house - on top of the water tanks, on the edges of the brick roof facades - and I’ve often stopped to watch them as they watch me. I’ve admired them as they’ve looked down at me with what I imagine is disdain. The females have on occasion built nests in the palm tree in my yard. Last Spring, I suddenly heard the sounds of a frantic grackle mama clicking and clacking which I’ve already learned means there is a kerfuffle happening of my cats up to no good. Indeed, I rushed out into the garden to find both cats intent on something in the bushes in the far corner. I ran over to find a big baby grackle, who had evidently fallen from its nest, cowering behind the bougainvillea with the cats stalking and attacking.

I tried pulling the cats away to get to the baby bird, but quickly realized that that would be impossible. So I snatched both cats at the same time, tossed them into the laundry room and slammed the door shut. Then I turned my attention to the baby, its saucer plate eyes peering up at me from behind the very gorgeous magenta blossoms and the very thorny branches of the bougainvillea. The thorns were over an inch long. Good hiding place, little one, good hiding place. The cats were screaming from the laundry room. Mama grackle and all the aunties were screaming from the palm tree, from the tall garden wall, from the roof, from all over the sky. The baby stared at me silently.

I figured I had about ten seconds to make my move. I reached down and swept up the baby in one hand, pulling it out of its refuge to the tune of 30 thorns raking my skin. I clutched it to my chest and ran for the door to the Fairy Garden. The mama grackle and all the aunties followed close behind, screeching, hanging over the garden walls, pecking the air towards my every move. I hollered up at Mama Grackle the whole way. I’ve got your baby! I’m taking her to the Fairy Garden! She’s gonna be okay! I’m putting her in front of Big Mama, in front of the stone statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe at the end of the garden path! It’s up to you now. You come feed your baby, you hear?! Don’t build your nest ever again in a garden with cats, you hear?! Your baby will be safe here with Guadalupe, ‘kay?!

I plopped the baby down at Guadalupe’s feet, next to the candles and crystals and flower petals that folks have left in offering. And the baby kept staring up at me with its giant eyes, completely still, being such a good baby. I thought, well, if all is well, maybe we could permit ourselves a quiet moment for a sweet baby portrait… with mama’s permission. And so I quickly took the photo that later would become a painting.

The interesting thing about the painting is that I decided to use a canvas that I had already started a different painting on but had never finished. It was a painting of reliquaries based on a photo I took years ago in the Basilica San Marco in Venice, Italy. I’ve been in an inquiry and exploration about reliquaries ever since, pondering at these containers for the sacred, what we hold sacred and how we interact with the sacred.

I have written about this concept, “Reliquaries, Containers for the Sacred,” in the following way: “While the idea of relics and reliquaries may connote primarily Catholic belief, and I don’t deny that I’m cozy with Saints and Madonnas, I find the concept ultimately universal across faith traditions with similar questions for contemplation: What is the object of my veneration? What do I hold most sacred in my life? How can I create a container for it, so as to understand its holy nature, interact with it, open it, and amplify its blessings into my life? How can my reliquary be a window of blessings pouring into the world that is in such need of our healing prayers at this time?”

So how does the story of a baby grackle merge with the story of reliquaries aside from providing cool multidimensional visuals on the canvas? It’s about salvation for me. The literal act of physically saving a small creature is one type of salvation. The creating of a container for the sacred and delivering our soul to the divine is another type of salvation. It is the daily striving to understand ourselves as a part of Creator and of Creation, of the fine line of duality merging for mere milliseconds in our comprehension into a state of Oneness, Union. When humans are on an existential search for meaning, our minds try to repackage such vast and abstract themes into more accessible portions for easier mundane consumption by naming, portraying, painting pictures, and telling stories. That’s why I decided to paint the wee grackle with big eyes I saved into a painting that had reliquaries in it.

The grackle baby becomes a metaphor for my own quest to have a large hand scoop me up and place me beside the Divine Mother for safekeeping, to remember the closeness of the sacred, to remind me that I am always watched over and cared for, held in a vast container for the sacred that is this life.

As I was writing this today, I stepped out into the garden to feed my cats and noticed that Kaetzi didn’t show up at her dinner plate. I walked further out into the garden with that sinking gut feeling, and there she was, hunkered down in the long grass. I approached and sure enough, she had a bird between her claws, batting it back and forth. I swooped my hand down and grabbed it. As I lifted it up, I realized that it was … a baby great tailed grackle… Much smaller than last years, fuzzy on its head, its eyes barely able to open. I cupped it to my chest, its own chest heaving, its whole body a beating heart, and I took it to where I take all the rescued creatures at the base of the figure of La Virgen de Guadalupe in the fairy garden. I heard no Mama grackle clicking and clacking. Just me and the very tiny fuzzy baby.

I left it on the ground, but when I checked back later, I realized that between its very tender age and its injuries, it couldn’t keep upright, and had flailed about from side to back the whole time it was alone. I picked it up again and held it for a while. The holding seemed to calm it. The warmth of my hand. The solidity beneath it. I’m trying to feed it mashed bananas and soggy cat food paste (according to Google some viable options) but it’s just sitting now in a tiny little basket lined with paper towels chirping in the tiniest way.

I don’t know what will happen, but apparently this is a part of salvation. If it goes to the realms of the light, then that is salvation. If it somehow continues on in the physical realm of creation with me feeding it cat food (what an irony), then that is salvation.

In any case, here we are in the middle of Creation, always part of Creator… and that is our Salvation. Me Peace be with you! Happy Mother’s Day to you in all the ways you mother, nurture, love, care and tend… Blessings to you!

Love,

Emily xoxo

“Salvación” - acrylic on canvas 60x80 cm Copyright 2026 Emily K. Grieves

www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

So many of you have reached out to me to express your concern and to send love and prayers after yesterday’s tragic violence on the Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan. I have struggled to find words to share in response, as we are all still in shock and heartbroken at the act that took an innocent life and injured several others. I was incredulous watching the many videos of what transpired as I had been there at that very site just 48 hours previously. I sat with a friend on the platform in front of the Moon in deep meditation and ceremony, connecting to the Great Mother’s womb of creation through the portal of the pyramid.

I think that this event is symptomatic of something much bigger that is happening in the world. I’ve been noticing it for some time. Duality is becoming amplified. Violence against the feminine is becoming more obvious. The paradigm is threatened and attacks against the feminine are growing. Mistreatment of Mother Earth is at a peak. It’s been going on for centuries, millennia, but it’s come to such a crescendo that we can no longer look away. And right here on this sacred land of Teotihuacan, on the body of this living being, where so many of you have come to experience transformation, to come into your heart, to return home to yourselves, to be held by the Great Mother, the reflection is all the more pronounced. Duality. The illusion of division, of separation. Pyramids are amplifiers of energy, of course, and the Pyramid of the Moon is a powerful portal of the Divine Feminine, so it’s all up in our faces now.

Two thousand years ago, the original masters and creators of Teotihuacan studied and strived for achieving a state of Ometeotl, of the Divine Energy of Duality Merging into Oneness. They surrounded themselves with symbols of duality merging into union, separating, coming together, serpent bodies interlacing like double helices, threads crisscrossing across the bodies of jaguars into infinite interlocking connections … knowing that the awareness of the true nature of reality comes only when we see from the heart, when we see ourselves to be inextricable from the One Whole, the One Consciousness.

Some people have worried that the violence of yesterday’s act somehow ruined the sacred energies of the pyramids. The pyramids have outlasted hundreds of years of conflict, conquest, challenges and change. I think perhaps the invitation here for us is to reflect on our own deep connections to the gifts we’ve received from Teotihuacan and from the body of the Mother. I believe that those of us who have had the privilege of receiving her gifts, those of us who have been touched with extraordinary (and sometimes exclusive) experiences within “the fold of her garment” here in Teo, have a sacred responsibility to share those gifts with the world.

If you have felt love here, you must share the love. If you have felt clarity, share that clarity. If you have touched compassion, let your heart shine into the world. Whatever insights you have been privileged to gain about the nature of creation and the truth of life on Earth and far beyond, now is the time to share them. Teotihuacan back in the day was a place of study and mastery about creativity. Every creative act was in emulation of the Great Creator, just as every creative act was a reminder of our inherent place within Creation. These masters covered every surface from ceramic plates to temple walls with visual symbols that served as conduits of highly advanced frequencies, refined energies to uplift their spirits and open their eyes to the true nature of divinity and the spark of it in each of our hearts. With so much destructive energy in the world right now, it would behoove us to return to the origins of creation, back into the great Cosmic Womb, and reinitiate our relationship with the power of our hearts.

I painted this painting many years ago. It is called “Rio de Luz.” River of Light. It is said that the original Teotihuacanos were master hydraulic engineers who could conduit water where they wished, and that one of the things they did for ceremonial purposes was to direct water like a river from the Pyramid of the Moon descending down the Avenue and through the plazas. I have always found this idea captivating, and began to see the Avenue looking up towards the Moon as a great birth canal, the Pyramid as a sacred vulva and the Cerro Gordo hill behind her, originally called “Tenan” or Great Mother, as the pregnant belly of the Mother laying on her back, incubating us and all of creation in her womb.

To walk “upstream” to the Pyramid of the Moon is to walk with intention back into the source of creation, as in a conception, to gestate there, to grow, and to be reborn with awareness, in a full reflection of light and connection, ready to create a new life in this world from the heart. This painting, “Rio de Luz,” reminds us that water is the most precious element. In her womb, it is the amniotic fluid that holds us in our development. In our embodiment, the water that flows through our physical form is our life blood. We must bring our awareness to the place from which our blood is pumped, our heart, and when we see from the heart, then we might awaken for a moment to a state of Ometeotl, the Divine Energy of Duality Merging into Oneness.

Finally, my thoughts today are that we must not turn away. We must not turn away from the horrible things that happen in the world no more than we must not turn away from the Pyramid of the Moon. Let us walk toward her, again and again. We must open our eyes and see, just as we must open our hearts and see.

Thank you again for all of your prayers, love and support for me, our family, for all those affected, for the community here, for the sacred land. We deeply appreciate it and likewise send you all our love.

Love, Emily

“Rio de Luz” copyright 2012 Emily K. Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

As some of you might know, I’ve been preparing for a solo exhibit that will open at the end of June. It’s been quite a thing. I often wish I had all the time in the world to paint every day. Those of you who have visited me in Teotihuacan, and see me running around at our hotel Villa Las Campanas and in our gallery, have on occasion asked me when I find time to paint. And I tell you that I’ve learned over the years to grab every moment I can find, even if it means that I paint in 10 minute spurts.

I’ve learned to click in to the meditative creative mode in an instant, because I have no other choice most of the time. I imagine the flow state as a broad river running below my days, and that I can connect to it instantly with my intention. It’s like switching tracks between the winding looping rollercoaster path of mundane business craziness and constantly moving deeper rails and trails of the great road of consciousness. It sounds impossible to do, but like anything that requires practice, it becomes easier and easier to make the leap back and forth the more you try.

It doesn’t always work of course, and I spend plenty of time flailing around and frustrated, believe me! But my cue to click in and switch tracks seems to be the simple act of putting my painting apron on. A simple act, for sure, but something about it cues my brain to go into mystic mode, painting mode, dreaming mode, flow mode. I guess I’ve trained myself over the years to recognize the putting on of the apron as the sign to drop in. It’s like the garment changes my identity in that moment. The apron becomes my super-hero cape, my invisibility cloak, so that I can creep past ordinary reality without being seen by those who might stop me, and dive into the realms of the non-ordinary spirit world from whence inspiration erupts into color and form.

I’m sure I’m not the only creative who struggles with fitting creative time nuggets into busy everyday schedules. I’m curious! What are your strategies and tricks for that quick identity shift and traveling between realities at the drop of a hat? Maybe we’re all just a bunch of magicians and master shape-shifters! That wouldn’t surprise me at all!

Here’s one of my most recent paintings that I’ve created for the upcoming exhibit. It’s called “The Ecstasy of Creation,” because isn’t creation just ecstatic?!

Sending you all so much love,

Emily xoxo

“The Ecstasy of Creation,” 50x50 cm, acrylic on canvas, copyright 2026 Emily K. Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

I have had my dear friend Francis Rico on my mind. He passed away this past October, and there is a celebration of his life happening in California where he lived today on March 22. I think of him so frequently. He’s even appeared to me as a guide in the spirit realms during my shamanic journeys. He was one of the most generous people I’ve ever met, always supporting people in need, running fundraisers, organizing benefit concerts. He was an enormous champion of my artwork and always tried to include me in his online events to feature my latest paintings or a creative prompt. I’m forever grateful to him for all he did for me to promote my art and to encourage me in my artistic endeavors.

In 2022, he commissioned a painting of Quetzalpetlatl from me. When he said he wanted an image of Quetzalpetlatl, I stopped and said “huh?! Do you wish to tell me anything about her?” He just smiled with that sweet mischievous gleam in his eyes and said “no, I want you to explore her on your own from your perspective. I’ve met her at the Pyramid of the Moon, but I want you to bring your own connection to this piece.”

All I knew about Quetzalpetlatl at that point is this sordid little sidenote to a famous Aztec (Mexica) legend about her brother Quetzalcoatl. When I googled it just to see if there was anything else, I literally couldn’t find anything but that nasty little story, and most versions didn’t even include her name.

In this mythical legend, Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the human incarnation of the Feathered Serpent deity, was a righteous king of the Toltec city of Tula. He was apparently a very reclusive, spartan and virtuous priest, who instituted many changes in the society, preferring peace and justice over warfare, and converting the city of Tula into a great cultural, religious and artistic center a thousand years ago. For reference, Tula was the capital of the historic Toltec cultural group and one of the places where Teotihuacanos went to establish after the decline of Teotihuacan around 700-800 A.D.

Quetzalcoatl’s “cosmic twin” Tezcatlipoca is a trickster deity, the dual force to Quetzalcoatl’s goodness and virtue. In a scene not unlike Jesus’ 40 days in the desert when the devil leads him into temptation, Tezcatlipoca tricks Quetzalcoatl into drinking pulque, a fermented alcoholic drink from the maguey plant that was a highly regulated ceremonial drink in pre-Hispanic times. Quetzalcoatl had always been an ascetic teetotaler and so with this trickery he became extremely inebriated.

In his excessively drunken state, Quetzalcoatl ends up having sex with his sister Quetzalpetlatl. When he finally sobers up and realizes the many shameful things that he has done, he seeks self-punishment and exiles himself, traveling to the Yucatan and sailing off into the Eastern seas, promising to return again one day. Such was his Messianic prophesy that when Hernan Cortes and the Spaniards came sailing from that directing to land on the Yucatan coast during the foretold calendar cycle, the people thought it was Quetzalcoatl returning making it easier for Hernan Cortes to waltz right in to Mexico and conquer it.

So Quetzalpetlatl – in most versions of the legend, she is nameless and described as his sister. In some versions, she is named and sometimes described as a woman dedicated to the gods. A priestess. Perhaps a spiritual sister rather than an actual blood sister, but a serious transgression, a violation, none the less. The legend is really even more complicated and extensive than that, and there are so many layers to unpack here obviously, but I had a painting to make of her. Quetzalpetlatl.

As I’ve mentioned in other publications, I usually do a shamanic journey to connect and gather information about the image that wants to reveal itself across the portal of the canvas. When I journeyed to open the conversation with Quetzalpetlatl, I realized many things, but one of them was that she was the human incarnation of Xochiquetzal, just as Ce Acatl Topiltzin was a human incarnation of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. Xochiquetzal is the goddess of Love, of fertility, abundance, beauty. Her name means “Precious Flower.”

I’m no expert in Aztec or Toltec mythology, nor do I claim to be very knowledgable about either, but I do have a love of the much earlier culture of Teotihuacan, its symbolism and dreaming practices that can access encoded wisdom through the visual references still left in the fragments of murals and carvings in and around the archaeological zone today. It’s hard to imagine that the bridge to the original meaning of the spiritual tradition is really broken. What we have available to us today about ancient myths and cosmology is inextricably linked to centuries of distortion through conquest and colonialism. Teotihuacan will always be seen through the lense of the Aztec/Mexica, who discovered Teotihuacan in ruins more than 500 years after it had been abandoned, named it, and adopted what they thought its meaning was.

Whatever the Teotihuacanos observed as spiritual practice and cosmovision had already morphed through many centuries, a millenia even, of their own existence, then dissipated through migration to places like Tula and Xochicalco and far beyond, through the interpretation of the historic Toltec, then reinterpreted by the Aztec, then forced into secrecy and hiding during the Conquest and subsequent 500 years of colonialism, only to “reemerge” in the past few decades as a modern mestiza population began to search for a new identity informed by an indigenous past. So you see, it seems the bridge is broken. It would appear that there really isn’t a direct connection to the spiritual heritage of Teotihuacan. The main access now is through dreaming. We can use dreaming practices to “converse” with the last few visual fragments, murals, stone carvings, ceramic pieces, that give us clues to a greater spiritual energetic vocabulary that we can only “dream” of understanding some day.

Through dreaming practices with the remaining visual symbolic lexicon, one thing I have come to understand about the Teotihuacano cosmovision is that there are 3 central tenets: our understanding of existence is made up of Duality, Quetzalcoatl and Ometeotl, and they are inseparable ultimately, looping into themselves in an eternal state of Oneness regenerating itself infinitely… if that makes any sense… a circle, a toroid, a four petal flower…

Duality: we live in a state of separation in our human existence. While we are in Matter, in physical form, we imagine ourselves to be separate from Energy, from the Great Origin of Creation. We live in a dual state where Creator and Creation are considered separate. As humans, we can’t even imagine ourselves a part of either. We pine for God and yearn for a sense of belonging to something greater. The Teotihuacanos seemed acutely aware of this duality and left extraordinary evidence of the intentionality with which they strove to recognize the connection points of their relationship with the sacred, with the Divine, with the One.

Every aspect of the Divine, which centuries later would be interpreted as “Gods and Goddesses” by other cultures, recognized the all as “the both and.” Every aspect of life contains equally both polarities, the masculine and the feminine, light and dark, active and receptive. Life on Earth and the Divine are inseparable. Even the Christian Bible says “as above, so below.”

Quetzalcoatl: the Axis Mundi, the union of Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld. One might imagine the often-misunderstood Underworld as the Great Womb of Creation, out of which all other realities are born. Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, with its aspects of Eagle (Upper World), Jaguar (Middle World) and Snake (Underworld) merged into one being represent the vessel we must become in order to overcome the illusion of duality and achieve a state of “Ometeotl,” union with all as One. Quetzalcoatl, usually thought of as masculine, is a duality like all aspects of the Divine in the pre-Hispanic cosmovision, both masculine and feminine, duality in one. Their many serpent scales and feathers at times manifest as kernels along the life sustaining corn cob, each kernel like a mother’s breast, providing sustenance and nourishment for the people. Quetzalcoatl, the giver of life.

Quetzalcoatl, more than a being, is a practice. When Quetzalcoatl shows up as Ce Ehecatl, the Wind, they are sweeping your path clean, removing obstacles that stand between you and your awareness of “Ometeotl.” When Quetzalcoatl appears as Venus, the Morning Star, rising just before sunrise, they are heralding the promise of the return of the light. This is a spiritual promise, reminding us in our practice to remember that the Sun will rise again, that we will feel the warmth of our Star upon our face again, that we ourselves are part of the energy of that Star and all of existence. Quetzalcoatl’s reminder to us is that the experience of duality and separation is but an illusion we have been programmed to believe in during our time in this Earth School of density and matter, and if we practice remembering the Union of Heaven and Earth in our hearts, becoming the Axis Mundi, the Pillar of Light within ourselves, then we might awaken to a state of “Ometeotl.”

Ometeotl: “The Divine Energy of Duality Merging into Oneness.” The One splits into Two, the Lord and Lady of Two, Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl. In their separation, if you imagine them as two circles now instead of one infinite circle, they form a vesica pisces shape between them, the yoni, the cosmic vulva of all Creation. Creation, with a big “C.” When the two split and replicate again, they are four, each vesica piscis shape appearing as a flower petal on the four petal flower that is the sign and symbol of Ometeotl. If you continue separating and replicating out in all directions, all those flower petals/vulva shapes become DNA strands weaving energy into matter into infinite existence.

The path of creation into the infinite is the same path back to the One, to Ometeotl. If you look at the original four petal flower, you might realize that the Sixth Sun, the prophesied new great era we’re moving into (think Age of Aquarius, or New Pachukuti), is named Xochitl. “Xochitl” means “flower.” Xochitl is the age of beauty, harmony, balance, perfection. Imagine the four petals of the flower as the first four Suns in the Mexica mythology, as eras or worlds the gods created but destroyed. The fourth Sun was destroyed by flooding (sound familiar?) The gods gathered in Teotihuacan to create the fifth Sun, Ollin.

Ollin means movement and has been defined by great action, development, invention, movement by humans across the globe, to the point of chaos (and self-destruction perhaps). You might imagine that the movement of Ollin is like blood being pumped through the body, and our awareness has been out in the limbs of the body, the four petals of the flower, rather than in the source of that movement: the heart that pumps the blood. It is said that the mastery of this Sun is to bring our attention back to the heart, with its four chambers, and to see from the center of this place. See from the Heart.

When you see from the Heart, from the center of the four petaled flower, then you might realize that you have never been outside the flower, outside of Xochitl. Thus you move into the Sixth Sun. You realize that that process of creation never takes you outside of the original circle, the original One that originated all of Creation. We are always, have always been, inside the One. Xochitl is the Great Awakening to realizing that we are Ometeotl.

So how does this relate to Quetzalpetlatl and the painting that I was making for Francis Rico? In my dreaming, I moved far beyond the limited distorted deeply marred story of the human characters in the mythology. A lot of my artwork is about redemption of the Feminine. Mary Magdalene, Eve, and so many whose names have been lost through the ages, whose stories have been demonized, whose power has been minimized and stripped away…. But Quetzalpetlatl inspired something so much deeper for me. Her story is a glimpse into the nature of Creation itself. She is Xochiquetzal in human form. She is the Precious Flower, the awakening to Ometeotl, to blossoming and being in the inextricable embrace of the One Flower of Creation.

The name “Quetzalpetlatl” has meaning as well – it means “Precious Mat” (or the Mat of Quetzal Feathers). On the surface, we might think yeah, everybody treated her as doormat, stepping all over her. And this is certainly true as the centuries have shown. But a deeper meaning of the “petate,” which is a traditional woven mat usually made of palm or tule fibers, is that it was a crucially important fundamental object in indigenous life – babies were born on the petate, people worked and relaxed on their petate, they slept and dreamed on their petate, and when they died, they were wrapped in their petate like a funerary shroud. The petate accompanied people throughout life in every aspect of life, like a sacred weaving from Creator to Creation and back to Creator again. The “Precious Mat” is like the Divine Creator who weaves the fabric of existence, who spins Energy into Matter on her universal spindle, and who threads our many realities through the eye of her great bone needle and stiches us all together into One .

When I finally finished my painting of Quetzalpetlatl and gave it to Francis Rico, he smiled in that sweet awake way of his, looking into my eyes with a look that said, “yes. You understood the assignment.” I am so grateful for the opportunity he gave me by commissioning this painting of Quetzalpetlatl, to learn, to communicate and to receive from her. Of course, I am eternally grateful to Francis for many many more things, all the many ways he supported me, invited me and challenged me to grow, and so lovingly and selflessly celebrated my triumphs. I celebrate the life and memory of Francis Rico today and every day. He loved the Spring Equinox, always planting hope and compassion and reminding us that those seeds are an inherent part of our hearts. He would love to know that our hearts are awakening to Ometeotl, to Xochitl, to the knowing that we are an inherent part of the sacred and precious weave of Creation.

Finally, I want to share Quetzalpetlatl’s message with you, that I channeled upon completing the painting. May it bring you the blessings that have always been yours…

Here is her message:

“I am unbearably beautiful. I am made of flowers. I am the fertility of life. It is I who creates life in the body so that you can achieve consciousness, awareness in form. I give you your form and the senses by which you live in your body. I give you pleasure so that you may enjoy life and its many flavors and colors. Without me, life in form would have no purpose. Receive your embodiment with delight. Enjoy it. I have been gravely maligned by the fear of men in power, to the point that those who have feared me have now forgotten me. I am standing behind a curtain out of sight. But I am still here and my power, beauty and desire are ever strong and undiminished. I cannot be erased because I am the essence of life itself.”

With much love,

Emily

xoxo

Image “Quetzalpetlatl” and words copyright Emily K. Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

This painting is called “The Power of Gratitude.”

Thank you for being, for continuing on in whatever it is that you do, your creative acts small and large every day, for the songs you sing, for the babies you raise, for the flowers you plant, for the meals you cook, for the hands you hold, for the circles you call, for the goodness you gift to the world. We need it! All my gratitude to you!

With all my love,

Emily

Image: “The Power of Gratitude,” copyright Emily K. Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

So I thought I’d share this painting with you, with my prayer and her channeled message. Let’s look for hope, soothing and abundant, everywhere. We just might find it!

This painting is called “I Am Creation Emerging.”

I Am Creation Emerging

Great Mother, we trust in you and your infinite plan for us. We are carried by your being as we traverse form after form throughout our lifetimes and soul experiences. Please grant us peace and the knowing that we are eternally yours…

“I am the All and I am Eternity. I come to you now in this form to awaken your memory of the many waves of life experiences you have had across the Infinite Ocean of Being. You are an inextricable part of me. You are of my body. I have shaped you with my own hands. You are made of my flesh and I have breathed upon you. Your breath is my spirit. The Infinite lives in you. I am Creation emerging, through you and within you. You are mine and shall live in my heart forever.”

Sending you enormous love!

xoxo Emily

Image: “I Am Creation Emerging,” image and words copyright Emily K. Grieves

January wanes as fierce winter storms grow and settle upon frozen land. I track the northern country of my origins, its battles, beliefs, tragedies, all of it … the miracles, too. In every disaster, there are pockets of humanity experiencing divinity. It takes the human to put Divine will into action, and we’ve seen this again and again in the noble compassionate acts of protection, support and defense on the streets of Minneapolis by its courageous inhabitants.

Much of my artwork over the years has been an exploration of finding this connection to the Divine while in human form. I’ve had an ongoing painting series for decades called “Navigating Miracles,” in which I have endeavored to understand how our soul moves through lifetimes as a part of something greater and how we maintain our compass tuned to the One Source. We might think of the original separation not so much as between us and God, but more as between Energy and Matter. Those of us living in this reality of human life in the physical world often find ourselves desperately trapped in the density of matter, longing for the freedom of pure energy, but we are in a unique position to live in awareness of being energy manifest in form. We are one or the other. We are both. We might only remember it in brief millisecond glimpses, but we are, each of us, a bridge between worlds. If we can awaken within this, we can put divine will into action, bring energy into form consciously, and realize ourselves to be an inextricable part of the whole, of the One. The ancestors of the land on which I now live, in Teotihuacan, Mexico, had a name for this: Ometeotl. The Divine Energy of Duality Merging into Oneness.

In my years of painting La Virgen de Guadalupe, people have often asked me how to connect with her during visits to her Basilica in Mexico City. I’ve always felt that if you want to find her presence, look at the people around you. Look at your fellow pilgrims, and you will find her reflected in their eyes. You will sense her in the lilt of their voices as they pray or in their steps on the smooth stone as they climb the hill to her original sanctuary. You will feel her in the warmth of hundreds of bodies pressing forward to stand for a second beneath her image. From the very first time that I painted Guadalupe’s image in the mural at the Dreaming House, I remember wanting her to look like a woman I might see on a street in our village. I imagined her inhabiting every woman. Any woman I passed on the street could be her.

This practice of finding the Divine in any person we meet reminds us of our own connection to the Divine. If we can find it in someone else, we can remember it within ourselves. I recently painted a version of La Virgen de Guadalupe that ended up being a lot about this connection between energy and matter, and how we might see it embodied in ourselves through her reflection. The painting named herself “Our Lady of Cosmic Connection” or “Cosmic Corn Mother” for short. When HeatherAsh Amara was here with her pilgrimage group in December, they carried the painting, which I had finished just the day before, as they walked 12 hours from our village of San Sebastian Xolalpa to the Basilica in Mexico City. They passed it around between them, strapping it to their backs, always handing it to the pilgrim who struggled most, allowing her to lift them up and lighten their steps to her home. You’d think that carrying a large painting would make the walking more difficult and burdensome, but strangely, when you offer your heart to carry the image with devotion and intention, it feels like she is carrying you.

I wanted to share her message with you today. As I have previously shared, I often receive “channeled” messages from the beings who reveal themselves though the portals of my paintings, and so it was with “Our Lady of Cosmic Connection.”

Blessed Mother, help me understand my journey with you:

I am to walk the fine line between worlds, giving energy to my own heart and allowing it to ripple out in infinite waves of love.

(She says Paint my image. You know this. If I am corn, then I am corn. But always paint my image. This is your prayer. This is why you are doing this.)

Blessed Mother, what message do you have for me?

This was a challenge for you because you are amplifying your connection to my cosmic realms. The energies coming through my mantle and through the vessel of my body are directly transforming you on a cellular level. You have entered a phase of elderhood in your human life and thus are remembering ancient knowledge that you have carried for lifetimes, as well as being initiated into new medicine ways that are necessary for you at this time and are coming from your ancestral family in the cosmic celestial realms. All these teachings are being conveyed to you and are activated in you through the map of my body and its energetic imprint on your energy field and awareness. This is an activation of the heart in my heart. Know that I am always guiding you in all ways seen and unseen.

You may call me Our Lady of Cosmic Connection.

Blessed Mother, what message do you have for me and for the pilgrims?

I am a beacon. I will guide you to your innermost knowing of yourself as a child of Divine Expansion. You are a thread in the fabric of my mantle and my body is All That Is Known and All That Is Unknown. I carry you in my heart and I carry you to your own heart. You are a part of my Eternity. Awaken your Heart and know yourself as my sustenance as I am yours. All will be well.

May her message be of comfort and inspiration for you. I share it with you today with all my heart and pray for you to feel protection, understanding, support, clarity of purpose, and compassion.

With all my love,

Emily xo

Words and image copyright Emily K. Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

“Our Lady of Cosmic Connection, Emily K. Grieves, acrylic on canvas, 60x80 cm, copyright 2025

Well, this year has gotten off to quite start, hasn’t it?! It’s had me wondering about the etymological relationship between the words “starting” and “startling.” I haven’t googled it yet, and maybe it’s just my wild imagination, but geez, there seems to be something there, don’t you think? I feel a bit startled in any case.

In my startled state, my creative juices have been a bit dry. When that happens, I putz about my studio anyway, often prepping canvases, doing more mundane things, cleaning and tidying and rearranging my gallery. The point is to be in the space, and the more you’re in the space, the more likely something will begin moving.

I have a big solo exhibit coming up in late June, and I know that those 6 months are going to fly by. So I finally busted out two big 80x120 cm canvases, set them up on easels, and blessed them. I bless my canvases by placing my hands on them and praying, asking my prayers to infuse the fibers of the fabric. I pour out holy water from the Basilica of Guadalupe into my hands and rub the water over the canvas. I pour Peruvian Agua Florida into my hands, clap them three times to activate the energies, and rub my hands over the rough gessoed woven surface. I call in all my spirit guides and ask them to help me open a portal through the canvas for the highest Divine healing energies and blessings to come forth and become manifest in this realm of reality. I pray that all who eventually come into the presence of what is revealed through the portal of the canvas receive what they need from Divine Source.

I remember when I started working in this way back around 2002-2003. I remember feeling limited by doing one-on-one hands-on healing energywork sessions. I remember thinking that as powerful, rewarding and humbling it was to work with individuals in that way, that there must be a more expansive way to reach more people with my healing work. I started playing around with the idea of how I could do this, be more effective, by channeling energy through my artwork.

I wrote the following in my statement for a solo exhibit called “Walking Between Worlds” that I had in August of 2003:

Making art is a spiritual practice. For me, it is about communicating with Divine Source and realizing myself to be a part of it. It is about embarking on a journey, walking between worlds, drawing connections and creating portals through which to deeply experience the Mystery of existence. My work is ultimately an intuitive symbolic experience. While symbols vibrate in new ways, they are signposts for our collective consciousness, directing us with specific intention toward the sacred. Something is sacred when it reminds us of our connections to the Divine, when it opens our hearts, and we remember Oneness. In this way, the symbols on this journey provide a template for us to be our highest selves. My artwork is essentially channeled work, and it is my truest wish that it serve as a healing to all who experience it.

As I prepare for my upcoming exhibit is June of 2026, it is good for me to go back and read things like that old artist statement and to remember the greater arc of my intention as I create new work. These moments are full-circle moments, and I recognize that I have not strayed from my path, even though it may have felt like it many times over the years. That old statement seems as relevant to me today as it did over twenty years ago.

Today I want to share one of my images with you that seems to resonate with so many people. Reproductions of this image, “The Star Caster,” are my best sellers in my gallery. Her message seems to be a very necessary one for this startling start to this year. Like my old artist statement, the Star Caster’s message seems as relevant today, if not more, as when I painted her.

This painting was a commission for the amazing teacher and leader Carley Mattimore. She had been here in Teo on a journey with Stephanie Urbina Jones, when we wrote the first Shaman Heart book, and Carley processed the breakout group I was in for a shamanic breathwork session. When Carley told us about the vision she had had during the breathwork, I gasped out loud because I could visualize the whole scene as a painting. When I told Carley about it, she kind of gasped as well. Could the vision really become a painting?

I told her that there was no pressure, but just in case she ever decided she wanted to commision a painting of the vision, that I would take some photos of her posing with a basket. She went home then, and about six months went by before she contacted me to tell me that the ancestor from her vision kept appearing to her and that she needed to move forward with the painting. We talked about her intentions, and I told her that I would journey back into the vision. It was a powerful journey and I was deeply moved as I began drawing, planning the design of the image, and then painting her.

As I painted this image and shared progress photos on social media, so many people commented on it and seemed to relate to it, seeing in the figure someone they knew, saying “She looks just like my grandmother, just like my teacher, just like my friend …” Everyone seemed to recognize her. I realized that she is the Universal Ancestor. She has a message for all of us. When I finished the painting, I channeled her final message and it was profound for me, how her message felt both personal and universal and precisely the medicine for these startling times we’re in.

I have been reading her message out loud a lot lately, to folks who visit my gallery, and every time I read it, something is quickened in me. My voice breaks and tears come. Below I share the message with you, with the prayer that something stirs in you as well, and that you know that you are not alone. You are held. There are guides and ancestors here with you. You might not see them but they are here. And may you know that there is hope. You might feel fear, but there is star light all around you. May you feel it, and may you receive the warmth of star light upon you.

So today, here is the message:

“It is clear, I am here to bring balance.” … her words in first journey.

My original journey for connection with her…

“She came from a faraway galaxy to Earth carrying her basket of stars and walked a long road through the desert under the starry night, coming to a dark village of round huts. All feared her except the old wise woman in her hut at the end of the road. They made soup together after the wise woman invited her in, they shared their meal and then the wise woman packed her bundle of things and set off down the road. It was the changing of the guards and the star basket woman would now take her place in the hut. She opened her basket, the stars illuminating the hut, and she began to unpack the stars hanging them on the ceiling, then going out and hanging them on the outside of the hut. She sat down and began blowing starlight down the roads with her basket under her arm. Very slowly the villagers began to come closer, afraid but curious, drawn to the shining light.”

Her message to me once completely in finished painted form …

“Star Caster, please tell me your message!”

“Blessings from afar. May these blessings land and reside here and now, in your heart. I have traveled for lifetimes to be near you, to bring my light to your world. There are many of us and we are always near. We are tasked by the galactic body of alignment to bring hope to your world, and it is our eternal duty and desire to open portals for the inhabitants of Earth that light may flow within the matrices of your awareness and that balance may be re-established. The powers that rule Earth have been out of balance for time beyond memory, but there are benevolent galactic forces that are actively working to re-establish balance and harmony in the physical and psychic realms of human life on Earth.

You are an integral part of this work as you serve as a portal. Your ancestors are supporting you in this. I am one such ancestor, but we are many. You may find that you encounter fear as you do your light work. This is natural as familiar patterns are being broken up. But I implore you to persist as I have in the face of fear and know that the Light you are sharing is mightier than any obstacle. You may call on me at any time. I am here and available to you to support you in your mission. I am the Star Caster, the Ancestor of your Heart.”

With all my love and prayers for you,

Emily xo

Words and image copyright Emily K. Grieves

“The Star Caster” copyright 2023 Emily K. Grieves

www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

This new image of Guadalupe is part of a larger series on the theme of The Secret Garden. The series came to me in a shamanic journeying process and while I originally thought there would be 13 paintings (and maybe there still will me), I received 4 of the images in that vision. One of these images was of the Mother surrounded by butterflies. These paintings are large format– 80x120 cm. – and I’m playing with new energies and new styles in them. The large format begs for more expression, more abstraction, looser brush strokes, more open spaces where energies can move in and out between the colors. This is wildly challenging for me. It forces me to trust that I don’t need to tighten up. It forces me to release my tendency for chronic perfectionism.

This painting was even more challenging than most because the beautiful person who is giving it a new home bought it long before it was finished. This added more pressure to “not screw it up” and to fulfill a certain expectation (even if that expectation existed only in my own mind). It was like the Mother was daring me to stay loose and free and to move into new territories of trust (as confirmation, right as I typed the word “trust,” the song I’m listening to had that word in the lyrics literally in the same moment!!!!)

The themes coming through from the entire Secret Garden series have been about this embrace of a new freedom. It is about tending and cultivating your garden with care and love, but allowing your garden to do its own thing. To let the wild be wild. It’s about recognizing that we have no control over nature… Quite the contrary, in fact, and whenever we try to control it, we cause more damage than anything. Have you ever seen an over-tended “perfect” garden? I have, and I have to say it’s astounding how humans can take the soul out of the land by being too uptight and wanting everything to be “clean” and “perfect.” The same applies to paintings. The same applies to the gardens of our own heart.

So that’s my learning curve these days … let the wild be wild, let the imperfect shine in its natural beauty, let there be room and space for energy to move… let yourself trust in the precious order of the divine … let yourself trust yourself!

Whenever I finish a painting, I listen for a message that wants to come through. These messages have been enormous gifts, resonating long after the work is done… And when it’s the Mother speaking, I listen even more deeply. While these messages sometimes might be directed to me or to a specific person who commissioned or purchased the painting, the messages are universal of course. They are meant for all of us.

So here is the message from this painting, who aptly named herself “Our Lady of Freedom.”

Blessed Mother – What message do you have for me?

I love you infinitely. You must never doubt my love for you. I am here for you. I am here to remind you of the precious being that you inherently are, of your worthiness of life, of the light of your soul. I am here to remind you of your freedom to be exactly who you are. Feel your freedom like a caress from my hand, holding you up to the light of my heart. I love you without condition. I love you infinitely.

I am a part of you. Remember and do not doubt your divine nature. The path you must walk now in life is of a greater nature, of expansion, of service to my message and my mission. This mission that I give you is to grow your love and to remember that I live in you and you live in me. You are sacred, an expression of divinity in form as a woman. Remember your power and its sacred expression and share it with the world. Remember the humble ways of the Mother, of me and my heart, and as you walk in my footsteps, you will find great freedom. You will come to realize that I have never abandoned you and that I am guiding you at every turn in your path. Remember who you are and that I love you infinitely.

It seems so simple, doesn’t it? Often the simplest things are the most essential and the most profound.

May your New Year of 2026 bring you blessings from the Mother and may you know the freedom of our heart and the beauty of your true wild nature! May your garden grow in abundance! Happy New Year!

Love,

Emily xoxo

Words and Image copyright Emily K. Grieves 2025

“Our Lady of Freedom” 80x120 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2025

www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

I trust you are well in these days of darkness and light! Solstice days, like our Winter Solstice yesterday, always feel poignant and filled with a sense of longing and nostalgia for me. Melancholy even. These days are threshold days and even if we don’t pay any attention to them, they are tipping points for the world. Duality seeps into our awareness - the two hemispheres of the globe, the two hemispheres of our brains … we feel the separation that is the nature of our existence, and something at the edge of our perception makes us yearn for belonging, for that ever-elusive merging into union with Life itself.

I spent the day on the edge of the Pacific, watching white cranes dart for fluttering sardines in the shallows while dark lurking vultures perched overhead on boulders waiting for leftovers. In the late afternoon I hiked out to the southernmost point of the state of Oaxaca to watch the sun set on the shortest day. The thinnest crescent moon laid back like a finely woven hammock in the purple dusk. Waxing. Growing. The moon is thickening again and the sun will begin its slow move north, lengthening bit by bit, adding a few more minutes of light each day.

I prayed as I watched the crane and the vulture in their sacred theater, playing at portraying duality, clouds and rocks in perfect reflection of each other, ocean water rushing around my feet, cleansed by an urgent tide… I prayed simply to feel at ease in my existence… to stop worrying… to stop feeling like I should be doing anything other than what I am doing.

Later that night I looked up at Orion and my eyes followed the line of his belt further into the sparkling dark until I found that familiar luminous cloud of (more than) seven stars, the Pleiades. And I prayed again to just feel at peace here on Earth during my time here. Just to breathe, to breathe easily, peacefully, to release the constantly held breath… to relax my shoulders always braced against the world. These Solstice prayers don’t have to be big. The smallest of prayers will do just fine.

Here is a Solstice (ok, one day post-Solstice) Creativity Prompt for you:

Solstice is a threshold where darkness and light lean toward each other. Create from the place in you that is learning how to live inside that leaning. Offer a small prayer through your creativity—not for transformation, but for ease in your own existence.

Sending you blessings and love!

May your holidays be peaceful!

xoxo Emily

Photos and words copyright 2025 Emily K. Grieves

I wanted to share an old post about pilgrimage with you as we are in the final days of preparation for the Feast Day of La Virgen de Guadalupe on December 12th. I’ve written a number of things about pilgrimage over the years, about devotion and devotional practice, and my heart is always moved by the human faith, will and desire that moves us to embark upon the pilgrim’s path. I originally wrote this (with some new edits) for Shiloh Sophia’s beautiful Red Madonna program. This week we are hosting HeatherAsh Amara’s group that will be doing the very walk I mention in this writing. They will be walking 12 hours on December 11th to the Basilica in Mexico City from our little village of San Sebastian where they are staying with us at our Hotel Villa Las Campanas. This is an invitation for you to join your prayers to those of the many pilgrims and allow your heart to be carried to the home of Our Lady.

It is almost December 12, the high holy day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the pilgrimages have kicked into high gear. All along the highways leading toward Mexico City, pilgrims walk with little more than a bedroll and an image of Guadalupe strapped to their backs. Long lines of pilgrims on bicycles pedal along the bumpy shoulder of the road, a lumbering truck leading the way like a guardian and plucking up both the tired and those with flat tires. Relay racers in Lycra tights and Guadalupe t-shirts run along the edge of the freeway passing a lit torch to another runner waiting by the next kilometer marker. The pilgrims rely on the charity of others for food and water. If they walk in groups, they bear a banner with an embroidered Virgin image to lead them and keep them united. If they walk alone, their thoughts are between themselves and the rocks on the road, praying in penance or gratitude, making promises, asking favors, sending all their heart’s burdens and love to their holy Mother with every step. As they pass through villages on their way, kind neighbors step out into the street to hand out cups of juice or sandwiches, to cross themselves, to wave.

On December 11, the pilgrimages begin in earnest, as people push their endurance to reach Guadalupe’s home at the Basilica in Mexico City by the time the clock strikes midnight, ringing in Her “birthday” as millions sing “Las Mañanitas” to Her, to receive Her special blessings, deliver their petitions, and pour out their hearts in thanks to Her. Pilgrims walk through the night along the dangerous edges of freeways, or make their way on rickety bicycles, flowers and balloons tied into the spokes. If they battled the scorching heat all day, now they shiver in the cold darkness, but keep on walking to the company of glittering stars shining from the crisp night sky. Pilgrims reach Her with blistered and battered feet, and still push their way through massive crowds to line up and wait, inching forward into the Basilica on their knees, holding their images up over their heads and bowing down, touching foreheads to the cool tile floor in front of Her.

I once had the amazing fortune of being gifted a rare ticket to midnight mass at the Basilica for the fiesta. It was gifted to me by a cousin of the Monseñor of the Basilica who had seen my mural of Guadalupe, but I felt like I had received a reward directly from Her for having followed Her mandate. I sat front and center, basking in the flow of Her energy, the glow of Her image, and listened to Mexico’s finest musicians and artists sing Her love songs, dance and recite poetry, all dedicated with bursting heart to Her. I was awestruck by the infinite stream of people crawling on their knees in front of Her. I was blown away by the passion with which people expressed their love for Her, weeping as they sang to Her and blew Her kisses. Tears streamed down my own face to witness so much love. People gave everything to Her, all their sweat and blood surely, but also all their hopes and dreams, trusting in Her to fulfill them, and all their guilt and darkness, trusting in Her to forgive them. She is the Mother, after all, She who asks the people “Am I not right here who am your Mother?” People who may have spent a year bereft and downtrodden can come to Her bosom on this day and remember again that She was always there, never more than an embrace away. She tells us that we are always “in the fold of Her garment.” She told the people that She is the Mother of Mexico, but She further declares Herself the Mother of all people from all lands who call to Her, who implore Her for blessings, assuring us that She always has been and always will be with us.

Many pilgrims walking the long path to the Basilica are following a mandate in the tradition of Juan Diego. Many have called out to their Mother during the year and feel they have received a command from Her to make this journey. If a prayer was answered by Her, they must make the pilgrimage to give thanks in person – if they don’t answer Her calling, they will feel out of integrity with Her and their own soul. It is only right to go deliver gratitude in person to the Mother who answered your prayers. It is kind of like a cosmic energy exchange, and the people have long recognized their Mother in Her, often calling Her by Her original honorific of Tonantzin, “Revered Mother.”

Both Her story and Her image gave the people reference points to which they could relate, hidden symbols and messages from their own cosmology. The indigenous people converted to the new religion post-Conquest knowing that their beliefs were hidden in plain view and would not be forgotten – to those in the know, their beliefs were preserved between the lines of Her official story written in the indigenous Nahuatl language, and they were preserved in the very folds of her robes as shown on the tilma. The Sun. The Moon. Heaven on Earth. The Four-petaled Flower symbolizing Life gleams in gold like a beacon from the center of Her pregnant belly.

The invitation She gives us in Her story, the “Nican Mopohua,” is a very important one. When She appears the first time to Juan Diego, he recognizes immediately who She is, and, establishing what reality or what dream he finds himself in, He asks “Is this the Heaven Earth Place?” Implicit in that question is the real possibility of finding oneself in a place that is heaven on earth, of dreaming a dream where heaven and earth are unified, a dream that has been offered by messiahs from Christ to Quetzalcoatl and surely beyond. In one version of the story, She gives Her name in Nahuatl to Juan Diego’s uncle Juan Bernardino as She cures him of the plague. She names Herself “Tecuauhtlacuepeuh” (from which the Spanish heard “Guadalupe,” hence Her name as we know it today), and one translation of this name is as “She Who Comes Flying from the Regions of Light like an Eagle of Fire.” She comes to earth from heaven bringing us light.

The promise of finding or creating heaven on earth is at the end of every pilgrim’s path. While most pilgrims are simple people with great devotion, and many are likely unaware of the deeper mystical opportunities offered by the path to Guadalupe, the matrix of Her spirituality is open to anyone paying attention and asking and praying in deeper ways. I have often seen the most humble indigenous people avoiding crowds and going straight to secret places of power within the Basilica, speaking prayers in their native language, and I wonder if they are the last initiates of long-forgotten rites, the carriers of the instructions left from old times, those who remember the true rewards promised to the pilgrim.

In my own quest for the promises of the pilgrim’s path and to understand Her message, I walked in pilgrimage from my little village of San Sebastian to the Basilica in Mexico City three years in a row. There is a belief that one must make the walk three times to fulfill Her mandate, and so I carried it out to the letter as Her devotee. The walk takes ten or eleven hours and you don’t stop, except very briefly for the call of nature if necessary. If you stop, if you sit down, it is very difficult to get up again. Muscles cramp, feet are rubbed raw, blisters overtake the soles of your feet. This is what pilgrimage is like: We set out at 1 or 2 a.m. on Dec. 11, in the quiet of night, gathering in a small group with flashlights and several framed images of Her, adorned with silk roses and tinsel garland. We stop at the outskirts of the village to ask for safe passage at “La Cruz,” a small street-side chapel of the Cross with a tiled mosaic of La Virgen. A winter night breeze chills us as we breathe steam into the dark tree-lined path that marks the beginning of our journey. Once we cross the bridge into the next town, we drop down the on-ramp and begin to follow the freeway that leads to Mexico City. We could have followed the train tracks, but the headlights of the occasional 18-wheeler barreling along the freeway provide us with a bit of comfort that the pitch black forlorn train tracks couldn’t. The night is silent except for gravel on the shoulder crunching under our shoes, and the distant howling of some dogs. We are alone with our thoughts, our prayers, and our mantras. Sometimes the curve of the road winds close to a train bridge and we see the bobbing lights of other pilgrims who chose that route as they gingerly navigate the railroad ties.

As a murky dawn begins to break, we dodge oncoming headlights to cross the freeway right before the toll plaza, duck under barbed wire and slide down the sandy embankment into the urban part of the walk. We balance along the spine of a giant cement drainage tube, then hop from stone to stone across the remnants of an ancient aquaduct. We are no longer solitary in our walk; rather it feels like what began as a little trickle of pilgrims is growing into a stream, rivulets pouring into a widening river of people all walking toward the same destination. Then we hit the pavement of Ecatepec which is really just an eruption from the sprawl of Mexico City. For hours, we follow city streets and sidewalks, our steps paced by honking cars and trucks spewing exhaust. We snake through crowded market stalls and taco stands that press upon the sidewalk. Clever vendors lay out displays of cushioned shoe insoles. The morning sun rises and casts intensifying heat on us as we shed layers, stuffing coats into backpacks without slowing our gait. Winter hats come off and sun hats take their place. It becomes difficult to lift our feet to step up onto the sidewalk. I find myself praying harder, concentrating more, visualizing Her in front of me as each step toward Her becomes more painful. When someone asks me if I think I will make it, I have no doubt. I never doubt. I say, even if it takes me 10 more hours of shuffling along like a snail in excruciating pain, I will make it.

Every block or so, kind people hand out bottles of water or food – orange slices, tamales, plates of rice and pork, little sugary candies to boost your energy. We don’t stop but gratefully accept a bottle of Pedialyte. Many of these people donate provisions to the masses of pilgrims in gratitude for some miracle received, as their own mandate. There is no need now to know the route – you just follow those who are walking in front of you and the river grows, flowing to the ocean that is the Mother. Whoever begins to lag or tires is handed one of the images of the Virgin we’ve been carrying. Strangely, carrying Her image lightens your load, lifts your burdens and carries you step by step toward Her Sacred Image at the Basilica.

When we finally get to within a few blocks of the Basilica in Mexico City, the river has grown beyond its banks and has become a sea of people patiently shuffling along towards Her. There is one last press of navigating a tight market place, and suddenly, unexpectedly, we are emitted into the grounds of the “Villita” itself, a hyper-real vision of rose bushes, sunlight and thousands of indigenous pilgrims, women with bright aprons and braids, men with old sweaters and worn sandals, camped out along the edges of the garden walls on checked blankets with bits of tarp tied overhead into makeshift tents. They have evidently been walking for weeks, coming from unimaginable distances, some even walking barefoot, to arrive to the Virgin’s house for Her High Holy Day.

We push through the crowd and into the central plaza in front of the New Basilica right before the security guards set up barricades to control the ever-growing mass of pilgrims. We move shoulder to shoulder like sardines through the giant bronze stained glass doors and into a narrow chute down a marble ramp that leads to the moving sidewalks that eternally churn pilgrims across the few meters of space below the tilma and Her Sacred Image. We turn our faces up to Her, and for a few seconds feel Her divine refined energy shower upon us as the sweet reward for having walked so far. For a few seconds, we feel like we are all cells pulsating together in Her sacred body, pumped like blood through Her veins, and in this moment we have just passed through Her Heart. A few seconds is all it takes. We are expulsed through the opposite side of the New Basilica, and we fall to the ground outside in any vacant patch of shade we can find to rest. We people watch for a while from our reclining vantage point, then maybe buy some candles, find a taxi to the bus station and sleep on the bus ride home.

I have visited the Basilica during “pilgrimage season,” not having walked in pilgrimage, but simply as a visitor with a group of Americans, and observed the scene from a different vantage point. We wandered the crowded grounds amidst grubby exhausted bikers all the way from Chiapas chugging back liters of water. Tired families camped out on blankets. Pretty little girls in their finest white lace and babies in frilly dresses got ready for first communions and baptisms. Children in traditional Mexican costume skipped and pranced through open church doors. The families observed us with interest and amusement, curious about the gringos ascending the hill with such intention, but respecting us as fellow pilgrims. We prayed with our candles and released our fears and gave our thanks. When we came to the little church, La Parroquia de los Indios, where Juan Diego cared for the tilma until his death in a simple hermitage, I inched my way into the crowd and heard the priest giving his sermon to the multitude, saying “You experience great hardship on your pilgrimage, walking many kilometers, arriving sunburned and blistered and tired, and yet you come with joy and love in your hearts. I ask you this question: Why do you do this only once a year? Why do you not walk through your hardships every day with joy and love in your heart?” The crowd listened with rapt attention as I took away this lesson from Juan Diego’s home. I thought about the priest’s message for a long time afterward. What if we walked through every day as if on a pilgrimage? To move through difficulties with love and joy would surely help us dream ourselves into the “Heaven Earth Place.”

What does it mean to go on a pilgrimage? To journey often long distances to visit a shrine or sacred place of great importance to one’s faith. To follow an urge to walk in one’s ancestors’ footsteps. To push oneself physically in order to break open spiritually. To dedicate a great amount of energy toward the object of devotion of one’s soul. A pilgrimage is arduous and challenging, but the pilgrim is willing to confront hardship or even danger as a way of overcoming fear, as a way of passing a test of faith. The test of faith cracks the spirit open to new possibilities, to new dreams, the dream of heaven on earth. I thought about the words of the priest from Juan Diego’s church, and I realized that life itself is a pilgrimage. We walk through the days of our lives searching for union with the divine, the sacred destination of life’s quest, and we encounter much hardship along the way. But if we persist, walking the path with love and joy, we reach our destination. On any pilgrimage, the destination is never really about the physical place but the energy associated with it and the way the energy uplifts us. It is the very way in which we make the pilgrimage that allows us to reach the destination. If we cannot walk the path to the Basilica this year, may we walk our every day with love and joy.

Image: Detail of “La Virgencita del Dreaming House” mural

Words and image copyright Emily K. Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

I visited the new “Casa Roja” Frida Kahlo museum in the vibrant Coyoacan neighborhood of Mexico City the other day. The museum, properly called Museo Casa Kahlo, just opened at the end of September and is the result of several years of hard work and dreaming by the family of Frida’s beloved sister Cristina. It’s just a couple blocks away from the famous “Casa Azul” and was the family home inhabited by Frida’s parents and sisters. When she got married, Diego helped them pay off the mortgage on the Casa Roja and registered it in Frida’s name. Frida herself lived in it during different periods of her life (like when she was fighting with Diego), and frequently visited her sister and cherished niece Isolda there.

The museum is elegant and charming, visits are possible as part of guided tours, and stunningly creative video mapping projections tell the history of the family and make it come alive. One of the highlights on exhibit is the very first painting Frida ever made in her youth, the “Tray of Poppies,” a still life painted on a round tray as a gift for an aunt. Given Frida’s recent record breaking auction numbers, with her “El sueño (La cama)” self-portrait selling for $54.7 million, one can only imagine what her first painting might be worth today. The museum also includes many of her letters, photos, dresses, jewelry, cosmetics, toy collections, and a special basement hideout where she apparently would retreat to dream and draw. It also includes an exhibit about Cristina’s charitable work for single mothers during a time when such a thing was virtually unheard of, and an exhibit about Frida’s work as an art professor, something we don’t often hear about.

Here’s a quote from that exhibit, posted next to her official ID credential from the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura La Esmeralda, about Frida’s work as a teacher:

“Frida was a teacher who shied away from academic solemnity and rigor. She valued the creativity of her students, encouraging them to find their own path and express the depth of their inner world in their artwork.”

At the end of the tour there is an incredible gift shop, more geared to classy design than to touristy souvenirs. We bought some “Frida Café” whole bean organic coffee, and as the woman at the register was ringing us up, I studied her face and realized that she must be Mara, the great-grandniece of Frida that our tour guide had mentioned. I recognized her likeness to her grandmother Isolda, who had been the apple of Frida’s eye. I decided to ask and indeed, it was her.

Me daring to ask resulted in a beautiful conversation and connection with Mara, in which I promised to send as many people as I can to this new museum, and in which I understood why they have nothing to do with the Casa Azul. I’d picked up on hints of the rift, division, or rivalry even, between the two museums, but I didn’t quite understand it until long after my visit was over. The Blue House was always the realm of Diego Rivera. When Frida died, it was Diego who defined the terms of what would happen to her things, her legacy, her identity. And when he died, he left those terms firmly clear. Even the opening of her famous closet, that revealed so many treasures, 58 years after his death was something dictated entirely by Diego. It was all “Frida seen through the lense of Diego.” What is different about the Red House is that it is about “Frida seen through the lense of her family,” her mother, her sisters, Cristina primarily, then her niece, her grandniece, her great-grandniece … it is “Frida seen by the women.”

This perspective that is offered at the Casa Roja is much more intimate. Instead of the focus being on a tumultuous passionate love affair with Diego, it is about the intimacy of home, of the love of the sisters who would place kiss marks on letters with cute terms of affection for each other, for little Isolda, for their mother, infinite little signs of love woven across the walls, through the glass display cases, settling into little dolls on the shelves, on the chair, on the bed. Even her relationship with her dear father Guillermo, the photographer, seems cushioned in softness, in respect and an unending sweetness that is reflected throughout the house. It offers a glimpse into the well-spring of femininity that nourished Frida at home, regardless of what was happening out in the big brash world of Diego’s shadow. Ultimately it seems that it is precisely this fountain of sisterhood that allowed Frida to drink deeply and grow into the larger than life figure she has become today.

I highly recommend a visit to la Casa Roja next time you’re in Mexico City! And I have a creativity prompt for you today inspired by my visit!

CREATIVITY PROMPT:

Feel the quiet lineage of women—named or unnamed—who have helped shape your courage to create. Let their presence be a foundation beneath you. How has your creative practice been influenced by them? Create something that honors the house they’ve built inside your life. May this be a refuge for you, a sanctuary, a fountain of comfort and nurturing…

Play, paint, sing, write, cook, walk, do whatever you are called to do in response.

With all my love,

Emily xoxo

Image and words copyright Emily K. Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

Image: “Frida y la Lotería del Corazón,” Acrylic on canvas 30x40 cm, 2021, copyright Emily K. Grieves

Iva Enright and I take turns sharing our Monday creativity prompts with you that we create every week for our “StagWoman: A Portal for Creative Ladies on a Mission” Facebook group (join us at https://www.facebook.com/groups/stagwoman)

This Monday it’s my turn, but be sure to follow Iva’s Substack “Hello Sacred Artist: Wonder Stories for a World on Fire” so that you don’t miss her creative prompts when it’s her turn!

Hello Sacred Artist: Wonder Stories As Sacred Resistance

Hello Sacred Artist is the portal to the Secret Garden where we write, paint, dance, sing, and, cultivate wonder as an act of sacred resistance and refusal to comply.

By Iva Enright

As I walked out of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, my Muse fairly screamed this word into my ear: “Reliquary!” This mandate, if you will, that hollered into my awareness began my path of pilgrimage, of encounter, with that which we regard as sacred and holy, that which we venerate … a quest to find holy relics within our own hearts and to build a worthy container of devotion to hold these relics fast.

As I discovered on this particular journey to Italy in 2018 (and on previous and subsequent ones) to sacred sites and saints’ tombs, a relic is an object associated with a holy person or event. These objects may be a garment, a possession, or even a body part like hair or bones. A reliquary is a special container in which the object is placed so that it can be safely held in veneration. Often these reliquaries are placed on altars, or under them, becoming the center point of an entire site. It is not uncommon to find a vast church built around the reliquary, as if it were fundamental to the construction itself, an integral part of the foundation not only spiritually but physically also. Pilgrims visit these sites to be in proximity to the reliquary and make its unique energy the focus of their prayer and contemplation. That was certainly the case at the Basilica of San Marco, where we passed in silent awe before the tomb of St. Mark for whom my son is named.

In the treasure chambers and high altars of numerous other churches, we observed medieval glass vessels, adorned with gold filigree and faceted jewels, containing relics of saints and people who had lived their lives in a holy way, questing for connection to the Divine through their way of living – through prayer and contemplation, through action, through faith in miracles. The relics ranged from actual organs like hearts held in gold heart-shaped flasks to hand bones encapsulated in silver glove-like containers. A reliquary at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome apparently contained a fragment of wood from the Nativity cradle of Bethlehem. We saw St. Francis’ blood stained stockings with the mark of the stigmata in Assisi. We saw St. Clare’s rough-hewn gowns, hair shirt, and clippings of her own hair. We saw how visitors came from faraway lands to kneel between monks in mutual silent prayer before these reliquaries.

There is a quality to these ancient reliquaries that some may consider beautiful and precious, while others may see them as gruesome or morbid. I love finding things in life that present me with juxtaposition or duality. Every time I ran across a reliquary, I had the opportunity to ask myself, what do I venerate? Where does my devotion lie? If I could identify the focus of my veneration, of my reverence, how would I keep it safe? How would I elevate the object of my devotion into a space of beauty? Would I place that which is most precious to me in my life in plain view on top of the altar? What do I hold most sacred in my life at a time when the world at large seems to be on a path of desecration and destruction?

In those questions, I also got to ask myself about my relationship to the Divine in general. I am actually not Catholic (I consider myself an interfaith open-hearted witch), but I have a deep attraction to the ritual and ceremony of that religion, and the art that has been created for centuries around it. I am deeply aware of the history of the Church and that much of that history is filled with darkness, violence and conflict, colonialism, conquest and oppression. I have spent decades holding Christianity at an arm’s length because of the global pain that has sadly accompanied the development and enforcement of much of its dogma. And in the way of duality, I have to admit that I love saints. There are saints in many religions and traditions, not just the Catholic, and I am inspired by the idea that humans anywhere in the world might live a life dedicated to the Divine. I love the Virgin Mary, just as I love the Divine Mother by any of her faces or names around the world. In the Catholic tradition, which has defined the imagery of the Western spiritual world I grew up in, I love the icons that seem to emit a profound energy of healing and possibility.

These images seem like portals to other dimensions to me, as if through contemplation of the icon, the image swings open like a doorway and I can step through. These open doors extend a path in front of me that leads me on a pilgrimage into my own heart. As in any spiritual path, there are moments of darkness and moments of light. Where is your attention? What inspires you?

So today, as I bring my reliquary painting back home from the exhibit, I wanted to offer you not only a creative prompt but a deep inquiry for you to hold in your heart’s pilgrimage through life: What do I hold most sacred in my life? How can I create a container for it, so as to understand its holy nature, interact with it, open it, and amplify its blessings into my life? How can my reliquary be a window of blessings pouring into the world that is in such need of our healing prayers at this time?

Love, Emily xoxo

Words and image copyright 2025 Emily K. Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

“Reliquary” 30x40 cm, acrylic on canvas

I am “republishing” an old post from October of 2017 that I originally wrote for Shiloh Sophia McCloud’s beautiful Red Madonna program. My exploration for that forum was a quest for the Divine Mother in all her places and spaces and ways of appearing, looking for her aspect of Mary, digging into old Christian scripture and tradition to lift her up into view, to connect with her in the here and now. I’ve always considered myself an interfaith mixed media witch, and there are many things that I appreciate and value in truths hidden deep between the lines of the scriptures, the gnostic gospels, and the teachings of Master Yeshua.

In this October of 2025 that is now coming to a close, I have Mary on my mind as we’ve been through numerous funerary rituals lately, experiencing some painful losses, and preparing for our annual Dia de los Muertos festivities. One of the most defining things of the funerary tradition here are the rosaries. The rosaries are prayed beginning with the velorio (wake) for the dead, open casket set up in the kitchen or the dining room of the person’s home, the next morning before the procession to the mass and then to the cemetery. Then a novena (9 days) of rosaries are prayed for the soul of the departed, finishing on the 9^th day with a ceremony dedicated to the cross which is then planted on the tomb. Then rosaries once a month until the year death anniversary, then every year … for each of your dead… the months and years fill with the rolling waves of rosaries.

The rosaries are prayed by a professional “rezandera” prayer leader and use a rhythm of call and response with the gathered family and community, everyone praying in unison, in one voice. One of my favorite parts of the rosaries are what is called the Loreto Litany, and so in the spirit of the season, as the veils thin and we remember our beloved departed through symbol, color and prayer, I wanted to share this old publication with you. May it bring you insight and comfort for this season.

Metaphor. To use poetry to observe the subtle undercurrents of divine essence that run through everything mundane. To describe life through a lense of symbol, of lyrical similitude, of the tearing of the heart and its careful restitching. To catch the world in a weave of metaphor makes the falling bearable. Metaphor gives us all wings again and again.

Holy Mary, pray for us.

Holy Mother of God, pray for us.

Holy Virgin of Virgins, pray for us.

Mother of Christ, pray for us.

Mother of divine grace, pray for us.

Mother most pure, pray for us.

Mother most chaste, pray for us.

Mother inviolate, pray for us.

Mother undefiled, pray for us.

Mother most amiable, pray for us.

Mother most admirable, pray for us.

Mother of good Counsel, pray for us.

Mother of our Creator, pray for us.

Mother of our Savior, pray for us.

Metaphor and Mary – I immediately think of the Loreto Litany, the cadence of its reciting, the rise and fall of voices as they chant and repeat “Ruega por Nosotros,” after each of Mary’s endless names, names that are far beyond names, names that are each their own being in the body of metaphor that is the Divine Mother. Pray for us, intercede for us, beg for us, we supplicate you, Divine Mother, you who whispers into God’s ear, you who are the direct channel to miracles, to salvation, to the heart of the Divine. For as many names as we have for her, we have as many avenues of entry into comfort, answers to every question possible, fulfillment of every need imaginable, multiple and myriad forms of embrace to hold us, to tend to us in our every pain and joy.

Virgin most prudent, pray for us.

Virgin most venerable, pray for us.

Virgin most renowned, pray for us.

Virgin most powerful, pray for us.

Virgin most merciful, pray for us.

Virgin most faithful, pray for us

The Loreto Litany, also known as the “Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” is named after its first known place of origin at the Shrine of Our Lady of Loreto in Italy. Its first recorded usage dates as early as 1558. It contains both formal and informal titles used to name the Virgin Mary and is usually recited in a group setting as a call and response chant. The Litany was actually prohibited for a while under Pope Pius V in the 1570’s, as that pope apparently disapproved of “Marianism,” popular devotion to the Virgin Mary, and attempted to quell its overwhelming spread by forbidding the use of prayers and litanies in her honor. Proponents of the Loreto Litany attempted to appease the pope and allow the continued use of the Litany, as it was customarily sung on Saturdays in honor of the Virgin, by rewriting the text to pull the Mother’s names exclusively from Scripture. The new Scriptural litany was set to composed music and sent to Rome for approval by Pope Pius V. While his exact response is unknown, even the new litany was never permitted in Rome or any place other than the actual sanctuary of Loreto and in private devotion.

As a result, the original Loreto Litany, with all of its informal names for Mary, took root among the people, especially with pilgrims who spread the Litany via published song books designed specifically for pilgrims. By the time Sixtus V became pope, the Litany had spread extensively, as common people expressed their devotion to the Mother on their personal pilgrims’ path, calling Her by the names of their heart, ignoring any interpretation of religious law that would have denied them access to Her through the metaphor of her being. Pope Sixtus V declared his official approval of the original Loreto Litany via papal bull in 1587.

Mirror of justice, pray for us.

Seat of wisdom, pray for us.

Cause of our joy, pray for us.

Spiritual vessel, pray for us.

Vessel of honor, pray for us.

Singular vessel of devotion, pray for us.

Mystical rose, pray for us.

I feel those names for the Mother inside the intricate workings of my very cells, inside the sheath-like lining of my arteries, and the ballooning expansion of my bronchia as I inhale her names at the sounding of them on my tongue. It is as if through calling her by her names, she comes to inhabit me. This relationship of Mother to every living thing, this connection to the elements of our world through which we perceive her, dates back to the beginning of time. The calling of our Divine Mother as the Cause of Our Joy, the Mystical Rose, or the Morning Star has ancient roots, long pre-dating the Virgin Mary. For as long as humanity has yearned for an embrace from the great beyond to make life on earth meaningful, we have named our perceived Creator/Creatrix in relation to that same earth, its elements, its natural wonders that lift us up and motivate us to self-growth as much as our searching and our longing force us to keep taking one more step forward across lifetimes.

We relate the ebb and flow of life’s experiences to the movement of water under the moon. And the moon, with her full soft face gazing at us from the velvet sky, pulls sticky rivulets of blood from our wombs every 28 days just as surely as she pushes ever rising waves onto pillow soft banks of sand, foam rushing back down the slope of crushed shells, a crab scuttling frantically against the current. We have spoken in metaphor since we found language, the poetic version of words always peeling back a glimpse at the hidden, at what lies beyond the door of the fixed or the static, at what is mystery and unknown, at what would melt our wings should we fly too close to its heat. And so the impossible to understand Divine Mother, who calls to us from the threshold of our madness, doses out her love and compassion to us in metaphor. It’s the only way we can swallow divinity. It’s the only way we can metabolize Her infinite love.

Tower of David, pray for us.

Tower of ivory, pray for us.

House of gold, pray for us.

Ark of the covenant, pray for us.

Gate of heaven, pray for us.

Morning star, pray for us.

Health of the sick, pray for us.

Refuge of sinners, pray for us.

Comforter of the afflicted, pray for us.

Help of Christians, pray for us.

I have not been to Loreto although I dream it. I imagine entering into the “Santa Casa,” the Holy House that has been the destination of pilgrims since the 13^th century. I imagine its simple stone walls that have been caressed by the hands of the faithful over hundreds of years, feeling the cool worn surface under rough warm fingers. Perhaps there is a spot where the stone is polished to a gleam from the touch of millions. Legend and miracle and metaphor being fairly interchangeable, Loreto lore tells that this Santa Casa at the Shrine of the Lady is in fact the actual house that the Holy Family lived in. Four angels miraculously flew the house to Loreto from Palestine shortly before the expulsion of Crusaders from the Holy Land. More recent investigation by the Church into the linguistic origins of the legend has shown that a local aristocratic family called the “Angelos” was responsible for the transfer of the house to its current location in Italy.

The story tells that this is the house in Nazareth in which Mary was born and raised, the house in which Mary received the Annunciation, the house in which Mary raised Jesus. After Christ’s Ascension, the Twelve Apostles (hmm, or thirteen? Where was Mary Magdalene in this story of miracles?) converted the house into a church. We might even dream into the story and imagine the Holy House being the very first church, a humble structure serving the humble beginnings of a humble story that grew into grandiose in just a few centuries. The legend further recounts that in the year 336, the Roman Empress Helena made a pilgrimage to the site and ordered a basilica to be built over the little house in which worship of Christ continued until the fall of the crusader state known as the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the late 13^th century.

The house was rescued from destruction by the Turks in 1291 through aforesaid miracle, being picked up and flown by angels to a site on a hill in Tersatto, in present day Trsat, Rijeka, Croatia. A number of miraculous healings and an appearance by the Virgin at the site confirmed the sanctity of the house, as did apparently investigations carried out in Nazareth by the governor of Dalmatia at the time. The house made another flight three years later in 1294 across the Adriatic Sea to a forest near Recanati where it received its name from the nearby woods - Latin lauretum, Italian Colle dei Lauri or from the name of its proprietress Laureta. The house/chapel was named “Sacellum Gloriosæ Virginis in Laureto.” In 1295, yet another miraculous angel-aided move took the house to its present location, where some adjustments had to be made to the structure in order to accommodate its position on the current site, where it is now known as the Basilica of Our Lady of Loreto.

In a niche within the chapel is a small black figure of the Madonna and Child, carved of Lebanon cedar and adorned with an abundance of jewels and finery. It is not the original Virgin which was destroyed in a fire at the Santa Casa in 1921. The beautiful curious Virgin with her crescent moon swaths of black across her garment is a replacement, coronated by Pope Pius XI in 1922. Our Lady of Loreto was declared the patron saint of air travel and pilots, based on her experience, I’m assuming, as a seasoned air traveler herself, flying Angels Air between the Holy Land and all nations on earth and far beyond.

Queen of Angels, pray for us.

Queen of Patriarchs, pray for us.

Queen of Prophets, pray for us.

Queen of Apostles, pray for us.

Queen of Martyrs, pray for us.

Queen of Confessors, pray for us.

Queen of Virgins, pray for us.

Queen of all Saints, pray for us.

Queen conceived without original sin, pray for us.

Queen assumed into heaven, pray for us.

Queen of the most holy Rosary, pray for us.

Queen of families, pray for us.

Queen of peace, pray for us.

When someone uses foul language around here, people say “And you eat with that same dirty mouth?” We swallow what we carry in our mouth. We digest what we swallow. We absorb what we digest into our cells and it flows through our being. In like manner, we can imagine that when we use beautiful language, poetic and lyrical metaphor, when the sounds that roll across our tongue rise up in praise and prayer to the Divine, then truly the Divine inhabits us.

The air is shifting with the turning of the month.

The wind bites at sundown like a hungry dog

guarding a rotten meal. Night rises up to swallow it whole,

and the sun bleeds quickly into the underworld. The bitter

currents of the looming darkness flow for hours before faint

stars sparkle to life at last, timidly, cautiously, whispering

to the moon then of safe passage as she creeps

toward the western horizon. The moon, a thin sickle smile

drifting after the lost light of sun, could serve no other purpose

in this night but to promise us, who look neck crooked

into the vast above, that she will ever carry

the Mother’s feet, cradled in her hold, through growing

days of dark and cold. And when we shudder in spite of shawls,

hunching shoulders, pulling in, the death toll rings a sonorous

song of life leaving bones and crumbling leaves. The earth breathes

shallow, dying a little more each day, and we need nothing more

than to see her in the sky, the Mother who rides the moon.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, spare us, O Lord!

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord!

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

Pray for us, O holy Mother of God.

That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord God, that we thy servants may enjoy perpetual health of mind and body, and by the glorious intercession of blessed Mary, ever Virgin, may we be freed from present sorrow, and rejoice in eternal happiness. Through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Words and image (“Rosario” from my Dia de los Muertos Oracle deck) copyright Emily K. Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

MONDAY CREATIVITY PROMPT

Hello dear Creative Beings!

The energies are becoming more and more intense as this month of October unfolds. I think of the unfolding wings of a recently emerged butterfly. I saw a “newborn” monarch butterfly a couple weeks ago. At first I thought it was dying. It seemed weak and had fallen on the ground. Its vivid orange and black wings, dotted with white, were strangely curled and curved in upon themselves. The butterfly tried to stretch them, wagging back and forth on the ground. We clustered around it, wondering what it needed, how we could help.

As we looked around, though, we noticed 4 or 5 cocoons clinging from the undersides of some nearby plants. That’s when we realized that this monarch butterfly was in its birth struggle rather than a death struggle. It was working hard to learn about its wings in this new transformed state. It was a miracle to witness. It steadied itself in the light of the sun and moved those delicate wings from side to side, and then ever so slowly started straightening out. When we were focused on the other cocoons, the distinctive wing pattern glistening through the taut transparent veil, adorned with gold, the new butterfly silently took flight and disappeared without us even noticing.

Your creativity prompt for today:

What dreams or projects have you been incubating that are ready to emerge like a butterfly? Have you experienced a birthing process that at first seems like a death before you realize that you’re in a powerful transformation?

Write, paint, sing, cook, nature walk, gaze and dream about it in any way that calls you! Feel free to share here with us in this safe sacred space!

We love you!

Xoxo Emily

(Here’s a photo I took of one of the monarch cocoons we saw)

A new poem I wrote yesterday that I wanted to share with you. May it bring you a sense of making sense. Of sensitivity. Of sensing that you are part of something greater…

What Water Says

What would the water say if I could understand its words,

make sense of the quick bubbling and tumbling

as it flips its voice over smooth stones, pouring from the gourd

of the mountainside. Thin green reeds lay flattened from a recent flood,

the river banks bowing in reverence to the current, to the water’s

speech flowing and shimmering and growing. I tilt my head

and lean in, softening to hear beneath the rushing din, endless

waves of sound plummeting along between boulders, splitting

and merging over and over again, slipping in mud, guppies darting,

turtles lurching, dragonflies sparkling with holographic rainbow wings.

What would the water say if I asked it about our world, how to live, how

to survive? What if I asked it how to love, no matter what? Water’s response

would cascade and inhale in big gulping breaths, exhale foam and spray,

bright droplets shining on the mica and the quartz, those tiny details

that by the millions make up huge rocks that hold up the river and the sky.

Water would say hurry, fly with me until we reach solid ground, grow with me

until we reach plain land. What we need is space to spread

out, where there is enough room for all of us. Then we can slow

down, curl ourselves around the corners and roll deep into our beds.

Then we can carry long boats and push the oars forward. We can churn

your vessels over our waves and move you on our currents across smooth

green miles. See how we are many now? Further downstream, we forge

ever wider paths and become the sea. Grey pelicans dive and small crabs

burrow out of sight. The pale broad moon washes us with sandy

lilting tides and we flow out streaming, breathing in and out, being.

And this is when water says, see how we are one?

Words and image copyright Emily K. Grieves Image: “Divining Dreams”

www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

Dear Creative Beings – I’ve just returned from 10 days in the forest of northern New Mexico painting a mural for HeatherAsh Amara at her extraordinary Warrior Heart Ranch where she is working hard with her community to bring restoration to the land after a devastating wild fire a couple years ago. The mural is named “Restoration Sanctuary.” My time there was intense and felt like an initiation on many levels. I’m deeply grateful that I was able to create and complete the mural. It feels truly miraculous. I feel deeply tired and fatigued, and I feel deeply activated at the same time. Quickened in my soul. For many reasons.

One thing I observed is how wonderful it was to be off grid and not at the constant beck and call of my cell phone, my email, my social media…. I’ve never really taken a break from those things, and it was really eye-opening for me to observe and experience what a relief it became over the days to not have my attention hooked by the constant consumption of the algorithms.

Another thing I observed about myself was how deeply disconnected I am, as are many of us I believe, from nature… from the real truth of nature, not the little doses of it we may find in our daily urban or suburban lives, but real wild nature with its vast and imposing nights … total new moon darkness except for the Milky Way glittering overhead between the ponderosa tree tops … total silence except for a few crickets calling, or maybe an elk bugling in the distance if you’re lucky.

By day, the stream tumbles poetically over boulders and mullein gleams backlit across the slopes, a golden backdrop for the burnt trunks with green heads clinging still to life, soothing the soil, softening the healing of the land… and yet I walk gingerly through the forest, spooking at thudding steps echoing upon the ravine, realizing that the deer people are bouncing above me, not a human, not a bear.

I leap twice across the stream, testing the stones, measuring the distance, called by two giant boulders I see perched high upon a hill, finding the grandmother and grandfathers stones. I wonder how many millennia they have witnessed the turning of time, the growth, the decay, the fear, the wonder that passes through beneath them, above them, hearing the raven call and the hawk cry.

I turn to a tree and place my hand on the burned bark, whorled with red and black scars, dry resin frozen into long drips like old candle wax, and I feel the tender healing pulsing beneath the surface. All I can do is pray for it. And for all the trees, the little mushrooms popping from the bed of pine needles between the rocks, for the bushy squirrel who skitters from sight, for the gentle purple asters and the baby cottonwood trees. For the new young blue spruce that Ernesto planted up and down the mountain. And I pray to heal my connection to nature.

I have much to ponder and process now, but I wanted to leave you with a little creativity prompt today.

Creativity Prompt: What is your relationship with nature? Have you felt disconnected from the real wildness of nature like me? Can you imagine yourself under the Milky Way on a dark night or in a forest on a sunny day? What element around you can you call on to bring you a sense of restoration? And what prayer of restoration can you give to nature in return?

Create from this place. You might write, sketch, paint, or simply let the vision move through you in any way that feels right. There is no right or wrong—only the courage to show up and create, even now.

The courage to make a creative act and bring beauty into the world with intention can light up your path and show you the way forward.

Love, Emily xoxo

Image: “Restoration Sanctuary” Mural at HeatherAsh Amara’s Warrior Heart Ranch, New Mexico, copyright Emily K. Grieves

If you would like to know more about HeatherAsh’s project and support her work, you can find her Substack “Out of the Fire” at

Out of the Fire

How to Dance with Contradiction 🔥 Author of the bestseller Warrior Goddess Training 🔥 Firewalk Goddess and Fiery Leader 🔥 Land Steward and Lover of Trees 🔥 Newest book: Wild, Willing, and Wise

By HeatherAsh Amara

Dear Creative Beings!

I am leaving in a couple days to go paint a mural at HeatherAsh Amara’s Warrior Heart Ranch in New Mexico. In May 2022, she lost 175 of 180 acres of the land she stewards to New Mexico’s largest wildfire in their history. Since then, she has been slowly but surely guiding it on a path of healing and hopeful restoration. I’m very excited that she has invited me to paint a mural on the west wall of the community kitchen building. The building survived the fire with the miraculous help of some volunteer firefighters and lots of prayers marked into the very handmade adobe bricks with which the building was built by HeatherAsh and her amazing community helpers shortly before the fire happened.

Our intention for the mural is that it convey both gratitude for what was saved and survived and as a blessings and prayer for the healing efforts and what is coming back to life and being born anew. I’ve been working on the design for several weeks now, and haven’t quite found the “portal” in, so to speak. Part of me imagines that perhaps things will fall into place once I actually arrive to the land and get a feel for the energies in person. Looking at photos or videos can only convey so much.

The wall is huge, measuring 10 by 27 feet with a door and a window in it. It’s way more than anything I’ve ever done of this nature, and my mural experience is extremely limited… On some level I’m petrified, but on another I’m inspired, grateful, humbled, moved by the opportunity to take on this project.

I just had an intuitive hit today that the Mother, Guadalupe, Tonantzin, who will be an integral part of the mural by HeatherAsh’s request, needs to be moved to a different place in the design, a much more central place in the design. There will be butterflies and bees and ravens and flowers of all kinds. Stars. Honey.

As stumped as I am in the design creation, and how to efficiently project it and mark it on the wall, up on the mountain in the wild, I also feel that I’m being tested to trust in myself and in the divine guidance for healing that I’m being called forward to create for this intention…

Something seems to be telling me to release control and surrender. My nervous system has been majorly chafed lately, with floods and fires erupting in various ways in my own world, and so perhaps this mural mission is for my own healing as much as it is for the Warrior Heart Ranch and the community that calls it home.

It will be the Autumn Equinox, and the New Moon, and the perfect opportunity to bring our creative energies into prayer. HeatherAsh has a practice of making “seed balls,” little balls of clay and seeds mixed together and shaped into little spheres. She plants them intentionally into little areas that she is cultivating on the burned land.

And here is your creative prompt for today:

What wildflowers of healing will you plant?
Imagine your creativity as a seed ball — small, humble, packed with possibility. Create something this week that you could toss into the burned places of your life or the world, trusting it will take root in its own time. What seeds of beauty, prayer, or resilience are you planting?

Create from this place. You might write, sketch, paint, or simply let the vision move through you in any way that feels right. There is no right or wrong—only the courage to show up and create, even now.

The courage to make a creative act and bring beauty into the world with intention can light up your path and show you the way forward.

Love, Emily

xoxo

If you would like to find out more about HeatherAsh and how to support her journey of restoration at her Warrior Heart Ranch and her beautiful Warrior Goddess teachings in general, please follow her here on Substack at “Out of the Fire: How to Dance with Contradiction” https://heatherash.substack.com/

You can join me and Iva Enright for our Creative Ladies Secret Garden Society weekly open garden salons via her Substack subscription at “Hello Sacred Artist: Wonder Stories as Sacred Resistance” www.ivaenright.substack.com )

Image and words copyright Emily K.Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

Image: “ In the Palace”

Unfortunately there was a terrible accident of exploding fireworks that left many people injured. I’ve never liked the fireworks. There have been lesser accidents, and they’ve always made me nervous. Sadly, people in traditional little villages are very stuck in their ways and refuse to change. We’ll see if this latest event creates any change in consciousness, but I don’t have high hopes.

I’ve always wondered what the saints actually think of all the crazy activities that humans do supposedly in their honor, in their name. I wrote this poem many years ago around that theme, inspired specifically by the feast of La Divina Infantita. It seems as relevant today as it did years ago.

La Divina Infantita

I know from 4 blocks away

that there are empty bottles backstage

by the way the songs are lazy, blurry

and the band talks more than sings.

2 a.m. is way past bedtime

for this baby, the Divine Girlchild,

La Divina Infantita, on her birthday night.

Shuffling old men trudge her out to the dust

of the village soccer field in a glass case. They crown

her with an arch of pink balloons, while trombone

players, tubas and trumpets squawk a serenade

behind her. She never opens her eyes.

She sleeps forever, but they take her to watch

the fireworks anyway, shudders of burning gold,

fiery red and green balls shaking out

the smoky stars. Her eyes are closed to the night

sky, clouds skiffing across a half moon.

She looks inside herself instead, swaddled

in fine embroidered robes, dreams wrapped up

behind porcelain eyelids, behind airbrushed

rosiness on delicate white cheeks, behind little dollies

and teddy bears brought as offerings, birthday presents

to the god inside the girlchild. I want to tap

on the glass, know the Mother Mary hiding inside.

I want to know whether Assumption robbed her

of cronehood. I want to take an eternal

baby in my arms and dream her dreams. I want

to wake her up and hear her cry in hunger,

because everybody is hungry here,

thirsty. There are empty bottles behind the stage,

and the old men are stumbling into the

dusty fields, into the dark corners of night, far

from the church to which She goes home.

And here’s the poem I wrote last week, which I had realized would be perfect for that huge moon last night… the blood moon, shining her cool light over the aftermath of those fireworks gone astray into a crowd, and an eclipse happening somewhere in the world.

The Sun and Moon

Blanket flower, I wonder what it looks like in real life.

I printed out a photo and study its 13 petals, three notched

spokes with the perfect sunny gradient of red, orange, yellow.

I imagine it popping on the far edge of a desert, clinging

to that border where mountain begins to grow

forest, where a river tumbles and snakes down

from craggy land and ponderosa pines begin to rise

up the ridges. I imagine the soil, dry and crumbling

on the surface, roots digging like picks into the hard layers

underneath, dreaming into mica and nestling

into the crust of continental plates. Blanket flower, what

a curious name. Each petal is threaded with dyed wool

into perfect patterns, fibers running the length of delicacy,

red lines woven at crisp intervals into a golden mandala.

The sun and moon wrestle to the West, pinning reflection

to light and spiraling in an eternal war of dawn and dusk, or is it

a love affair? Some legends say that she slits his throat

with an obsidian knife each night, his blood dripping, red clouds

splayed across the horizon, his last breath feeding her as she

rises blue and solemn to shine into our darkness.

She resuscitates him each morning, lifts him up

and covers him with the blanket of her longing. She reaches

into his heart, breathes into his veins, and pours

her pitcher of water, offering her warm cup to his lips.

The blanket flower opens its blossom to the dawn,

becoming its own small sun, raising its head and pleading

for another chance at day.

I apologize if I’m a little short on words, or if my words fall short … but I’m feeling silent today, going deep into my own thoughts and praying, praying for peace and for healing … Bless you all! And thank you!

Words and Image copyright Emily K. Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

Image: “Ex Voto”

Dear Creative Beings,

Recently I shared a prompt with you about the theme of the empty nest, as I was in the process of sending my son off to college, getting him set up in his dorm, and cheering him on for his first week of classes. Well, after two fabulous weeks of university adaptation, nature had a terrible way of intervening. One Friday night, rain started falling on dry Queretaro. It rained and rained and rained, and the earth couldn’t drink up all that water fast enough, backing up drains, overflowing canals, and pouring into the streets and neighborhoods of that beautiful historic city…. and into my son’s campus.

He contacted us at 1 a.m. with photos he’d taken from his dorm. It looked like he was in the middle of a lake. He sent us photos that other students had taken in other areas of the campus – the gym was under at least 3 or 4 feet of water. The football field had become an ocean in the darkness. A neighboring dorm had a savage river of muddy water rampaging through a basement communal space, slamming furniture into walls and flipping sofas and tables in the waves. A security guard balanced on top of a floating rock wall cushion, using it as a life raft, pushing himself along with what looked like a broom as an oar. Some students were stranded in classrooms and spent the night sleeping on top of tables as water sloshed underfoot. All the power went out, and then the water in the faucets stopped, as the flooding seeped into generator rooms and overwhelmed plumbing and machinery.

In surrounding neighborhoods, fierce powerful currents of water flipped cars and trucks like toys and dragged them in their wake. Asphalt cracked and peeled, over 2000 homes were inundated with wet filth, and sadly 3 people perished, including a young student from my son’s university, torn away by the force of the cascade, tangled in weeds, in drainage outlets, or trapped under their car.

As morning dawned, my son put his boots on and ventured downstairs. In some areas, the water had subsided, and in others hundreds of workers from the city and the military had arrived with pumps to try to beat back the now stagnant water. My son traipsed through the mud to a nearby supermarket which had remained unaffected on higher ground to get batteries and canned tuna and packaged food. It soon became apparent, though, that the dorm would have to be evacuated as it would take a week or more to reestablish power and water. Most of the campus buildings included classrooms would be without electricity for the time being, so a notification went out that all classes would be online until further notice.

The priority for rehousing dorm residents in a hotel went to foreign students or students whose homes were farther than 3 hours away. They told any resident who lived within a 3 hour radius to go home. That included our son. I quickly bought him a bus ticket, and he was on his way home, with his essentials and his dirty laundry.

So now we’re all in a kind of limbo space for 2 weeks… If we were adapting to the empty nest, then what is this called? The half-empty nest? Or the half-full nest? Of course, we’re loving having our son at home for a while even if he’s mostly in front of his computer doing virtual classes and long distance homework. I feel for him and the disappointment of a truncated start to college. But he’s resilient and taking it in stride. I know he’ll look back some day and remember the grand adventure that initiated his university study.

So here’s a Creativity Prompt for you that is based on these ponderings and experiences:

Sometimes life gives us back something to which we’ve already said goodbye. How do you hold the tension of that? Make something that explores the in-between — the bittersweet mix of absence and presence, of endings that circle back into beginnings, of the half-empty/half-full paradox….

Create from this place. You might write, sketch, paint, or simply let the vision move through you in any way that feels right. There is no right or wrong—only the courage to show up and create, even now.

The courage to make a creative act and bring beauty into the world with intention can light up your path and show you the way forward.

Love, Emily xoxo

Image: “Guiding the Vessel,” copyright Emily K. Grieves www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com