The Artistry of Faith
Where everyday became a sacred prayer.
Dreaming, I wander barefoot through an ancient forest.
Under a canopy of trees, I move among the wood, leaves, dirt, moss, and stones. The ivy climbs, the ferns unfurl, and the wildflowers sprout in bursts of color. I follow an unfamiliar path as the breeze caresses my skin, raising tiny bumps on the surface of my awareness.
My tenuous steps lead me deeper into the woods. Fully present and in communion with my surroundings, I experience what I might have missed otherwise, for I can feel the spark of light within me before I see it—a patch of growing brightness ahead in the brush at the edge of the path. Wonder pulls me closer, revealing a spider’s web covered in iridescent dew drops. Mesmerized, I squat down before releasing my knees to see this creation more clearly.
Organically, I am moving with a wave of awe that shape-shifts me into a position of supplication. Kneeling on the forest floor, my hands gravitate toward the earth. I lean into reverence, beholding an intricate design woven of silk between two parallel branches. They are white and chalky, peeling in papery strips indicative of a birch tree.
I rationalize that these sturdy branches are growing unusually close to the ground. The trunk of a mature white birch is generally long and smooth, except for the all-seeing eyes on it’s bark. These scars are formed as branches drop over years of growth in an expansion so vast, I must look up to see its leaves that bend with the wind to paint strokes of green on a canvas of blue sky.
Then again, the frame of this web is not connected to a tree. It is a portal to another dimension—or a mirror, reflecting a vision I am both witnessing and experiencing as a living embodiment of wisdom I trace to the Emerald Tablet:
As above, so below.
As within, so without.
One with this illuminated web, I understand my life as a journey with all its twits and turns that form knots in the Divinely inspired pattern I am living—it is more complex than my mind can even fathom or my human hands might manifest.
My hands are what I once worried were “too big” for a woman who “should be” as delicate as she is quiet. But my mother always insisted our hearty bones and sinewy hands are what make us strong and capable. And so, I created—embroidering threads into pictures, crocheting yarn into blankets, and sewing fabric into patterns with quilted designs. I wandered for hours in the forest behind my home searching for wildflowers, while imagining stories to life in my natural surroundings before capturing my thoughts in journals.
Creativity was my unseen space of joy, but a desperate need to be seen and worthy pulled me away from my intuitive nature. Neon lights in the New York City horizon glowed with hope and promise, and I danced my way to success, falling into rhythm with a line of women trained to move in choreographed precision on the great stage at Radio City Music Hall.
I still sparkle from the crystals on my headpiece to the aura borealis rhinestones on my heels in memory of this dream-come-true. My false lashes flutter with excitement above my red-stained professional smile as the curtain rises, for I am a “world famous” Rockette. A sold out audience waits in anticipation of a performance I will deliver with cheer, but this light-drenched moment of feminine grace cast a dark shadow. When the curtain closed, I would step out of the spotlight into the backstage moments of a painful and hollow existence. Dancing on a manmade stage of steel starved my soul, and I left it all behind to save myself from a path of destruction.
In the chapter of loss and recovery that followed, I discovered Women Who Run With the Wolves where Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés analyzes “The Red Shoes.” This tale about a ballerina dancing wildly out of control, Estés explains, “is deeply rooted in our collective psyche.” Since my journey began—quite literally, in the red shoes I wore in my first competition while dancing to a song about this myth, I paid close attention. Having danced until I metaphorically “cut off my feet” to end the madness of an exterior trap, I heeded her wild wisdom about turning inward to reclaim my feminine instinct.
Reconstructing a story that is uniquely my own took time and patience, but I am nourished by a life made with love and care. In tune with the rhythm of my soul, I no longer allow an unconscious culture to define my feminine worth or shame the hands with which I create.
“Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver’s poetic question in The Summer Day inspired the architecture of my handmade life worth living, and the choices I make to thrive.
I am now a wife and a mother. We live in the country on a small farm where I tend gardens, animals, and the creative habits that bring me joy. Nurturing all the living things and my wild creativity requires a delicate dance between determination and surrender.
Inevitably there are moments when my life becomes as overwhelming as it is beautiful, but that’s when I head to the forest at the edge of my backyard. I wander in search of wildflowers until I find my way back home to write the stories of wholeness that are medicine, an elixir of my passion and vitality.
On my quest for wholeness, I have learned that flourishing is not a stagnant state, and I work at being “well”—eternally in the process of becoming. I bow to impermanence each autumn as I watch the green birch leaves turn to gold before releasing, spiraling back down to the root of their origin. Healing is a cyclical journey, and through many seasons of re-wilding, I have tended a wound as ancient as it is universal with humility, compassion, and acceptance—allowing rage to rise when she must.
I ask what she desires. I listen to what she says. I hear and understand what she needs. Then I reach back into the past, far beyond the timeline of my life, to link arms with the women of my ancestral lineage. Daughters of patriarchy, we march in unity with passionate concern about my children, the future we demand a better way for. In harmony, we speak an urgent question:
How will we restore balance?
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,” said Rilke, reminding me to trust the process and embrace blank spaces of possibility. I continue to live the questions I’ve long held with heart and hands that have turned over stones of experience and pages of books on a decades-long search for what’s been edited, erased, covered up, and burned.
Like a phoenix, we rise from the ashes to be reborn. With a simple shift in perspective, there can be growth and resilience gained. With eyes to see and ears to hear, we might awaken and recognize what’s hidden in plain sight. No, nothing is lost, for matter is energy that transforms, and Truth always finds a way to rise in the life-death-life cycle of Love.
A storyteller of hope, I have hand-gathered the words I sing over now with my most authentic voice—breaking my silence with this song about a web of light I found in the deepest, densest, darkest part of the forest.
Yes, it was just a dream, but a dream as potent as any experience lived in waking life, as real as my reflection in the mirror of my everyday, ordinary existence.
I want to touch the unfathomable to prove it is real, and curiosity lifts my arm. I watch my hand move with grace towards a reflection of the dancer I was, the mother I am, and the potentiality of all I am yet to become.
No, I do not need to prove what I know exists. Simply, I must trust that I will continue to be led as I breathe, love, witness, create, and surrender.
Yet another layer of fear that keeps me small is released as soft scripted letters begin to flow from my right pointer finger, forming words on the frame of the web:
“Where everyday became” flows onto the top branch before my hand shifts to the branch below it, tracing “a sacred prayer” in three more words of luminosity.
These two lines came from beyond and through me, manifesting a Divine message with human hands:
Where everyday became
a sacred prayer.
I stare at this co-creation of web and words that glow so blindingly bright, it startles me awake.
It is January 19, 2024 and one of the coldest days of winter, but I am filled with the heat of a mid-summer day, sweating from the intensity of my dream. I sit up in bed, speaking aloud the lyrics of a vision seared in my mind:
“Where everyday became a sacred prayer.”
The sentence I speak is grammatically complete, but lacking in some way. Disoriented, I wonder, Where? Where is this place of sacred prayer? Then, When? When will my life become a sacred prayer?, as I consider it prophetic prose suggesting what will be, at some point in the future. Then again, it just might be the answer to Mary Oliver’s question I lived my way to, because the only definitive plan I’ve had for my one wild and precious life is to “make it sacred.”
“To make sacred means to hold your life as an exquisite masterpiece. Each moment blessed with the capability to make your daily doing into the divine space and place of sacred hands.”
-Sarah Blondin
I follow flow, cultivate beauty, witness miracles, and bask in gratitude. I strive to be present, choose love, and hold those dear with my whole heart and mind and soul. I let go and let God, writing between the worlds of what is seen and unseen. Daily, I follow breadcrumbs of resonant words, symbols, numbers, colors, and synchronicities that inspire. A treasure hunter of goodness, I create a web of human curiosity by weaving threads as red as the blood of my womb from my Christian roots, to the science I studied, to the ancient spiritual wisdom that helped me heal, and the stories I have lived and recorded in journals. Like Carl Jung’s Red Book, this work is my church—my cathedral—and the silent places of my spirit are filled with writing, drawings, and watercolors that bleed beyond all the lines of reason into the intuition that resides in the right side of my brain.
I’m not an expert of any sorts. A modern contemplative? Maybe. On paper, I am a stay-at-home mom for 15 years and counting, which means I am everything and nothing—“just mom” in the undefinable role I play in the unquantifiable domain of caregiving. I find that motherhood is a spiritual experience much like the varieties William James analyzed and normalized, and seek to understand the power of transcendence. I won’t pretend to be a scholar, but since the mess, joy, losses, and miracles have transmuted into courage, I’ll wonder out loud about the unusual connections my brain likes to make.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about Marty Seligman’s epiphany in his rose garden that initiated the field of Positive Psychology. Esoterically speaking, roses are associated with the divine feminine and align with the energetic resonance of the heart.
This emotional cauldron at the center of our being is the source of the Love I hold my children with. The heart chakra I discovered through yoga and studied in my training as an energy healer is where I feel all those empirically validated positive emotions that serve to broaden my perspective and have helped me build a life worth living. Love is an ancient and universal language, but modern researchers are beginning to study heart coherence, and scientifically explain its influence on our health and wellbeing.
Blending science, spirituality, and physiology with a sprinkling of esoteric philosophy is nothing new. But what happens when I point from the rose to Mary Magdalene, a woman misunderstood since the origins of Christianity?
Since I followed her rose-scented legend all the way to a cave in France, I connect a red thread from her words about “the Good within our midst” in The Gospel of Mary to Seligman in his rose garden of “inherent goodness.” Then, another thread stretches to my master’s degree in Positive Psychology, and my thinking has made a full circle revelation.
I expand on this spiral of goodness here, but from Marty to Mary, my intention is to flood this corner of the internet with the Truth about Love—beginning with the sacred nature of my being that is a reflection of yours.
I rise in the darkness, and make my way to the kitchen while thinking about the branches supporting the web in my dream that were certainly white birch and somehow symbolic. I turn on the stove, and pick up my iPhone to fact check my basic tree knowledge while the water boils. A quick google search confirms my hunch that the birch has an extensive root system beneath the surface, often described as an interconnected web:
As above, so below….
By the time my tea steeps, I’ve well-noted the theme of oneness. A dream this potent is rare, but being up in the early morning silence is a daily ritual I began with Julia Cameron’s “Morning Pages” exercise. Over the years it evolved into a unique practice of holding sacred space for myself. The point is simply to be, residing in the silence of my soul before life with all its demands pulls me further away from inner peace.
I take a sip of my tea as I head towards my office, dodging a castle of legos and a Barbie camper on the way. I place my fleur-de-lis mug down on the desk in front of a window facing east—where the sun will eventually rise in front of me as the house begins stirring with life. But in this moment, it is still dark and gloriously quiet yet bubbling with potential in the way I imagine the womb of all creation does.
I light the candle on my altar, inhaling notes of sage, lavender, spruce, pine, and oak blended into "Fern + Moss," an ode to the forest. The light illuminates framed photos of my children, centered around a drawing my then five-year-old daughter made for me in 2014.
Five indigo flowers flourish beside an olive sprout in this expression of compassion she drew on a day of loss. She left it on my nightstand hoping simply that I would get up out of bed. I rolled over and saw a reflection of all that was born too soon, a baby boy I held in the palm of my hand.
I look down at the faint cross inked on my left wrist. This tattoo was not a declaration of faith, but a promise to not loose hope along with him. I spoke it as a question I’ve long held:
What should I hope for?
A decade later, this framed artwork on my altar tells a story about the five children I went onto have, against all odds. Each of these flowers dances to a unique beat, and I behold a pattern of flourishing in my tapestry of hope. With a simple shift in perspective, my daughter’s artwork is a garden of possibility—where the olive sprout is all that is yet to be born of the unseen spaces of joy and creativity I’ve quietly tended in motherhood.
I offer up a prayer of gratitude for the blessing of another day, setting the intention to walk slowly, bow deeply, and love fiercely. Then I sit down at my desk, and turn on the meditative music that quickly centers me. This is when I notice a spider crawling across my notebook. My instinct is to brush her away, but I hesitate. In the expanse of a breath I am redirected from fear to love when I remember that the arachnid is a primordial feminine symbol:
She is a weaver and creatrix of the universe.
Awestruck by her presence, I watch as she moves off my notebook, across my desk, and disappears in the window sill before picking up my pen to write. I attempt to capture this synchronicity with words that flow through me into a pattern as mysterious and real as the orbit of Venus, which draws a five-pointed star every eight years known as the “Rose of Venus.”
“rose”—“Venus”—“goddess”—“Magdalene”—“tower”—“strength”—“creator”—“mother” “web” “spider” “weaver” “tapestry” “art” “faith” “prayer” “six words” “six petals” “flower of life” “sacred geometry” “patterns” “awe” “positive emotion” “transcendence” “unity” “Christ” “consciousness” “love”…
These are just words, until I spin them into the sentences I will weave into stories of wholeness to share with you here.
May we rise, heal, grow, flourish, and create the hope we seek, for this is the artistry of faith.
Namaste,
Inspiration: Art and Faith: A Theology of Making by Makoto Fujimura
Soundtrack: Flight from the City by Jóhann Jóhannsson
Nourishment: Homemade Japanese matcha tea latte with steamed oat milk, Fern & Moss by Brooklyn Candle Studio
Guide: Making Your Life Sacred, a meditation by Sarah Blondin
On Faith + Flourishing in Motherhood
Here at The Artistry of Faith, I’m opening my heart and journals to share more on my journey to be WHOLE and the sacred creativity that makes my life most worth living—my intention is to demystify the spiritual experience by filling this space with the love and miracles that transformed my life.
If you subscribe, I’ll send my essays directly to your inbox as they flow forth in divine right timing, along with updates about my forthcoming memoir on faith and flourishing in motherhood that will take you on a journey of healing and wholeness from my career as a professional dancer, to my studies of happiness, through the struggles and joy of motherhood, to a cave in France and the legend of Mary Magdalene.
For more about Mary Magdalene, you can you can read on about her here or head over to
for essays and conversations on the divine feminine, because from the ancient goddess to the legend, archetype, and teachings of Mary Magdalene, I’m here to illuminate the good within our midst with a treasure of stories, science, and ancient spiritual wisdom for the modern woman.
Endlessly transcendent. I am so delighted to be gifted with your prose, I can’t wait for all that’s to come 💗
Alicia, welcome sister! Reading your words, sitting with your images and sacred stories--I am moved. Your words bring me peace. I can exhale, I can hold complexity, I sense beauty and grief together before me, woven in a holy tapestry. I can wonder before the holy within and without and not fight mystery as I take in your poetic and life-giving wisdom. I'm so looking forward to what is to come as well. Thank you for being here. I treasure this piece and will return to it often.