In a world where women spend years competing and dreaming of the gown they’ll wear at Miss America, I secured my spot in the Super Bowl of pageantry wearing a simple dress I’d found on the sale rack at Neiman Marcus for $100 and worn to my senior prom. Having heeded the advice of a designer I was referred to after winning a local pageant, we recut the basic dress, adding a slit up the thigh and a starburst of rhinestones for some requisite “sexiness and sparkle.”

I’d felt more at home in the unadorned, more conservative version of my red dress, but surrendered to the codes of a world I was only beginning to understand. In my first press interview, I said I intended to “live every moment” as the accidental sort of beauty queen I’ve always felt I was.

Though, to be fair, the women ages seventeen to twenty-four competing in this system (which has evolved from a 1921 Atlantic City bathing-beauty contest) did not (and still do not) think of themselves simply as beauty queens. We were participants in a “scholarship program,” as the organization, and those of us who wanted to be understood as more than the stereotype, liked to remind everyone—where talent and interview made up a substantial portion of the score and each contestant arrived with a platform she hoped to promote.

An eighteen-year-old aspiring dancer, I’d taken up the cause of breast cancer awareness in honor of my late grandmother, suffered through a few mock interviews, and was given a crash course in walking on stage in a bathing suit and heels complete with the perfect brand of spray adhesive recommended to prevent an onstage wedgie.

What I wouldn’t learn until I was actually at the state level pageant I would win was that waterproof mascara prevents tears from streaking black down your cheeks and Vaseline smeared across your teeth is the trick to keeping a smile plastered on your face for hours onstage—because eventually your cheeks begin to quiver, your mouth wants desperately to return to its natural position, and your upper lip starts sticking to your teeth.

I was, as one “expert” quipped, a “diamond in the rough,” the kind of contestant people were willing to rally around because they saw potential. Which might explain why my makeshift team of volunteer pageant “consultants” hadn’t bothered teaching me the more graceful elbow-elbow-wrist-wrist wave. Walking down a runway as the winner wasn’t part of the plan. At least not yet.

But there I was—the newly crowned Miss New Jersey 2002, about to be received by a congratulatory huddle of my fellow local title holders, women in a rainbow of gowns, rhinestone earrings, heels, and support pantyhose cut off and improvised into the kind of shapewear Spanx was only beginning to commercialize. There was duct tape too, working to both lift and flatten, according to the standards of feminine beauty on display. For all that went into competing to win, if these women were disappointed, I didn’t feel it. What I remember instead is their genuine support and the shock wave that washed into relief as they wiped the black streaks from beneath my eyes, and made sure the newly pinned crown was sitting straight on my head before the official pictures. Tending to me out of sight of the audience, they explained what I was struggling to understand:

“Alicia, you are going to Miss America!”

And three months later, I would find myself standing onstage in a national arena as the youngest and most inexperienced contestant at Miss America … “Live on ABC, from Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall!”

This is a fragment from what I have come to call my writing graveyard, a collection of journal entries, bad first drafts, chapters completed, and more introductions than I can count to the memoir I have been writing for the past seventeen years but have not published.

And though writing wouldn’t become something I needed until motherhood happened in 2009, I can trace this red-dress thread all the way back to its very raw first expression in a green-and-cream striped journal covered in garden flowers, butterflies, and French scripted words that I was given that night. Each of the former Miss New Jerseys present at the pageant had signed it, offering words of wisdom gathered from her Miss America moment and year of service: “Love the press and the press will love you,” and “Remember to remember,” are phrases I memorized.

My first entry is dated June 16, 2002: “The Day After.”

Twenty-four years later, it still feels like the right place to begin, even if what came after is what I am still writing to unravel.

What did it mean, really, to be Miss New Jersey?

Having imagined wearing a crown as a singular experience, I suppose what I least expected was the circle of women that came with it. I had just finished my freshman year of college and had not pledged a sorority. I don’t have a sister. Which may be why the ritual felt so unexpected and profound, as though it touched some ancient instinct to belong. What I remember most viscerally is the warmth and love in their eyes as they hugged me, one after another, each saying the same words: “Welcome to the sisterhood!”

I had won a title. What I hadn’t understood was that the moment had initiated me into a lineage of women who had each, for a time, stepped into the same sacred space—crowned and entrusted with something she would eventually pass to the next.

Today, I am not just a former but a forever, at least according to the group text chat thread in my phone named “Forever Miss New Jerseys.” We’ve been attempting to move over to WhatsApp for a few years now, because the space is limited on text and each year another Miss New Jersey is welcomed into a continuum stretching back decades, each of us transformed in some way by a title hard to define.

There is a strange mix of intimacy and distance to this group filled with strong-willed, opinionated, and entirely individual women—some I know quite well and others I’ve never met. The constant through it all is Sally Johnston, the official State Traveling Companion who accompanied each of us through our year of service. We are, collectively, “Sally’s girls,” because she carried the stories of one year into the next, bringing humor and love to a volunteer role she once described to me as a kind of ministry.

The chat is mostly quiet, but fires up over the annual pageant, health news, milestones, Sally’s notoriously inappropriate jokes, and the sisters we have lost, some tragically and far too young. And though we still haven’t found the perfect way to communicate, that chat group in my phone remains a touchstone to the humanity beneath all the mythology surrounding the title. The crown never made any of us the same or better than anyone else. It simply passed from one woman to the next, each of us taking our turn as an archetype of American womanhood.

The “Jersey” kind, anyway.

Where “What exit?” is a perfectly reasonable question, phone numbers begin with 973 or 609, breakfast sandwiches require Taylor ham (or pork roll, depending on which part of the state you come from), and the Shore is not merely a coastline but a place you go down to.

I was the North Jersey Italian version, from the more country part of the state (Exit 25), with the maiden name Luciano and a father in the garbage business—though Protestant, not Catholic. Make of that what you will, but stereotypes have a way of fitting just well enough to stick and badly enough to distort, which might explain why my onstage question at Miss America about The Sopranos caused the controversy it did. (But that’s a story for another day.)

Add beauty queen to all of that, whether or not you recognize yourself in the label, and the stories people tell themselves about you multiply.

What the title actually meant to each of us—none of whom, in the end, went on to become Miss America—is another matter. So, for that matter, is what each of us thinks about the system that crowned us.

We could probably find a different perspective among us on every controversial nuance of the thing, right down to whether the swimsuit competition, finally eliminated in 2018, should have been. What does it mean to put the female form on display? Is that celebration or objectification? Empowerment or exploitation?

Yes, those sorts of questions continue to surround the pageant. Like so much about women, they are ultimately about what we represent, what is projected onto us, and what we are made to mean. And none of it is easily resolved.

Over the years, Miss New Jersey, in all its complexity, has remained both a place I write away from and a place I keep returning to, somewhat annoyingly, again and again. Not only in a gifted journal, in memory, or in fragments of writing I’ve worked through and tossed, but as a Googleable title attached to my name. It was an obvious defining moment of my life: the kind that picks you up, spins you around, and drops you off in a reality that unsettles something you thought you knew.

There would be others. Dancing in a line of women at Radio City Music Hall, on the stage of the dream I had actually dreamed—precision-perfect in red lips and lashes while privately unraveling beneath the Rockette glam, agents, and opportunities at “the top.” Earning a master’s degree in positive psychology only to find myself, as a new mother, confessing to a Park Avenue psychiatrist, “I know how to be happy. I studied happiness. But I’m not happy.” And writing from a burn unit, beginning with the night I almost lost my toddler to an accidental injury—where words that had begun as a way to cope in motherhood first became something I shared and, in the sharing, made me a writer.

What I have found in writing through so much of my life is how rarely any experience means only one thing. Or at least how often the sparkle and the shadow occupy the same frame. Miracle and loss. Love and grief. Hope and despair, sometimes existing in the very same moment. Both/and, inseparable.

I have come to believe that the challenge and gift of writing is to stay with an experience long enough to see it in its wholeness. The beauty alongside the damage. The shame alongside whatever wisdom eventually came from it. The thing that happened to us alongside all the ways, years later, we might come to understand that perhaps it also happened for us.

Some experiences are easier to hold that way than others. And even when we can, wholeness is work. It isn’t some static place we arrive and remain, but something more like a dancer holding her balance—appearing still while making a thousand imperceptible adjustments to stay there. Which is why she returns to the barre, daily, to begin again.

I call this the illusion of grace.

Writing began for me as a way to cope before it became the thing I realized I wanted to do with my one wild and precious life, to borrow (as always) Mary Oliver’s way of asking us to pay attention to how we spend it. Through years of journals and bad first drafts, I came to understand it as both an art and a craft. Over time, the story I was writing about resilience and motherhood—and the faith I found along the way—became, too, the story of becoming a writer.

And once I understood myself as a writer, choosing to take it seriously came with another education in all the things a writer should be and do to become successful. Take the workshops. Find your message. Build the platform. Share the story. Then share it again. And keep sharing it, even when you’re convinced everyone is sick of hearing it. Yes, turn yourself into something recognizable enough to become a brand.

One writing coach called me the most prolific writer she’d ever worked with, which I eventually realized was a nice way of saying I had an awful lot to say. Too much, I sometimes thought. Too many words, too many feelings, too many stories that resisted becoming the neat message I thought I was supposed to find. (I am, after all, a Virgo with a Gemini moon.)

The answer, according to her and nearly every book about writing I read, was to stop overthinking it and share anyway.

I tried on different versions of this, often with the nagging sense that something wasn’t quite right. That I was stepping back toward the stages and lights I had spent years writing myself away from. Or that in making a story easily understood, I would have to flatten the very contradictions I had spent so long learning to hold.

And so the memoir remained where it had been for years, in fragments and drafts and various versions of itself, long enough that the baby who made me a mother is now applying to college.

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As I stare down that transition, a letting go that feels as daunting as the freight train of motherhood barreling toward me seventeen years ago, I can see how far all that writing no one ever saw has carried me. Because I did eventually publish a book. It just wasn’t a memoir.

It was 420 pages of historical nonfiction about Mary Magdalene, Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat, written with my best friend, .

And I think some part of me believed I had escaped the need to tell my own story in doing so. Which meant I didn’t have to climb back onto the stage of my own life. I didn’t have to feel the vulnerability of clicking publish on something personal, which, no matter how many times I do it, never seems to get easier. I could disappear into research and footnotes and tell hers.

Except Mary Magdalene is not exactly a woman you can write about without running headlong into questions of story and identity.

Who was she?

A sinner? A prostitute? A penitent? A wife? A priestess?

Or have we been looking at her through the wrong stories entirely?

That was the question Kelly and I spent years inside, following the earliest sources and tracing how one interpretation became tradition while another disappeared. What emerged was an argument of our own: that Mary may have been a philosopher, the eyewitness behind the Fourth Gospel, and the Beloved Disciple.

And then came the less romantic part. We had spent the better part of two years underground, stepping back from the podcast and the work we had been sharing here to write the book. Then we self-published it with virtually no momentum behind us. Now we had to find our readers and figure out where our work belonged in a cultural conversation about Mary Magdalene that seemed to be expanding by the day.

Yes if you look beyond the Mary inherited through centuries of Christian tradition and art—the penitent, eyes down, half-naked, repentant—another Mary is everywhere now. The feminine divine is on the rise (which I think, much like a scholarship organization for women that happens to come with crowns, is both powerful and complicated), opening up questions about Mary that for centuries were barely being asked.

And around her, an entire world has taken shape.

There are Magdalene mystery schools and priestess trainings. Initiations into ancient lineages. Sacred circles and sisterhoods. Pilgrimages to the caves of southern France and the waters of Glastonbury (both places I have been). Roses and chalices and anointing oils. Womb wisdom and sacred codes. Courses promising remembrance, reclamation, embodiment. Women claiming spiritual authority in her name. Goddess archetypes everywhere. Even mermaids, apparently, have risen from the depths.

And threaded through much of it is a visual language all its own: flowing gowns, bare feet, prayer beads, sacred landscapes, flower CROWNS. And red. Soooo much red.

Amid these adorned expressions of femininity, one image appears with remarkable consistency: Women in red dresses.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t have a reaction to this. For all its sacrality, something about it felt uncannily familiar. It is another way a woman might look, move, dress, belong, become. Another stage. Another costume. Another ideal to inhabit, only this one is held out as a path to the divine.

I had spent enough of my life on stages and in front of cameras to know that effortless femininity usually has a backstage. So I found myself wondering what was being pinned and tucked out of sight here, who was waiting for the right light, and how many photographs it took to create these promises of transcendence.

Because this is—well, lovely, especially where it invites women to imagine themselves beyond the old containers that have held them. But it is most certainly not how I found Mary.

Something about that disconnect unsettled me. And, as such things often do, it cracked something open. What came through was a vision. Or at least a memory that began to haunt me.

Of a girl in a red dress, before the slit and the rhinestones. Before the crown. Before she had learned to reshape herself according to the expectations of a world she was only beginning to understand—shiny and enticing enough that, when nudged, she began conforming to the version of womanhood that world rewarded with attention, approval, and a chance to be seen and heard.

Me, of course, but seen from across decades, contemplating the path between us. So call me Mary gazing into the mirror in Georges de La Tour’s The Repentant Magdalen.

There she sits by candlelight, one hand resting on a skull whose reflection she contemplates in the mirror. The skull and mirror traditionally speak to mortality and the transience of earthly life. And because this is Mary Magdalene, they carry another story too: the repentant woman contemplating the sinful life she was believed to have left behind.

Except there is nothing in scripture to tell us Mary Magdalene had lived that life at all. Which means the woman in the mirror has been shaped, too, by a world that needed her to mean something.

Looking back at the symbols of my own life, I wondered what story they told.

The dress. My lips painted in a shade of red I found that perfectly matched it. The starburst of rhinestones that wrapped around my back into a sparkling train. The crown that came in a velvet-lined box with my name engraved on it. The fluorescent-bulb-lined runway. My French-manicured acrylic nails grasping the scepter.

For years, I had written away from them, trying to understand everything the picture left out, right down to the red shoes beneath the dress. Red shoes, of all things—the image Clarissa Pinkola Estés uses for the instinctive life a woman can lose when she begins living according to someone else’s design.

The shadow alongside the light. What it gave me alongside what it cost.

But none of that meant I could shed the girl who had lived it in those fabulous red suede strappy Via Spiga heels (which, as I write this, I feel a pang of regret for donating to the New Jersey Historical Society in 2018, along with the dress, as I was shedding my old life in a move to the other side of the world).

Because I loved parts of that year. I was changed by it. I found women there who remain woven into my life. And more than fourteen years later, Sally would come to me with words she had been carrying since 1974, asking me to help turn the messages she received “from God” into a book that would make me the most unlikely sort of sacred scribe. That is another story for another day (in the meantime you can find the book here), but stranger still for an accidental beauty queen. Or enough to make me wonder how accidental any of it had been.

“This year happened because I needed to meet Sally,” I’d said in my farewell speech when I took my final walk with the Miss New Jersey crown on my head in June 2003.

Even then, I knew there was something greater in all of it than what could be so easily dismissed as pageantry. I just couldn’t have imagined how much greater, because I have since lived my way into a miraculous web of synchronicities that, one by one, spelled out the name Mary Magdalene.

It would be easier, I suppose, if I could explain it succinctly. Easier still if I could turn that mystery into certainty, authority, a hierarchy, a wardrobe. But I can’t. Whatever it is, it has only become more glorious and more complicated the longer I have attended to it—witnessing, wondering, writing, remaining awed and finding, as always, more to say than less.

The spiritual experience, at least as I have known it, has been far more human, lived, and unpredictable than that. Impossible to reduce to a sound bite or elevator pitch. Eternally uncontainable.

Motherhood is where I came to know this. It is also where I found Mary.

In the guttural sounds of birth and grief. In tending the body of a child I had brought perfectly into the world, now covered in scars. In the hands that held and rocked, pored over sacred texts, dug into the earth for answers, and grew gardens of beauty around what I could not fix. In the questions an accident left me asking about safety, about what, if anything, can hold us in the vast unknown of a life we cannot control.

None of which could be pinned, tucked, lifted, flattened, or otherwise made to behave.

And maybe that was what the girl in the red dress had been haunting me to remember.

The girl I had been writing about, around, and away from for twenty-four years. The girl whose story I had kept in the locked rooms of my heart, without ever being entirely sure why I should share it.

And for the first time, I understood why it had never stopped asking for my attention.

It was never only the story of a beauty queen.

It was part of the story of how I found Mary all along—and how I came to see her as I do.

And that made it a story I needed to tell.

Beginning with the one I just told you.

For more about the memoir, and how I’m sharing it one essay at a time:
→ Welcome to The Artistry of Faith

For the story of the burn unit, where all this writing really began:
→The Good Within Our Midst: Writing Hope in a Burn Unit (for paid subscribers)

For Mary Magdalene, whose story led me back to my own:
→ Visit The Magdalene Thread
→ Read Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat

Feedback from a writing coach I started working with back in 2014, when I realized I had to actually start trying to write the book I knew was in me.

Prolific was a generous way of saying I had an awful lot to say. Too much, perhaps. Because my problem was never finding something to write about. It was figuring out how to whittle down what I felt and thought into something another person could actually read.

I’d been writing since early motherhood happened to me in 2009—all the emotions, the wonder, the enormity of it—filling pages with words I wasn’t sure I would ever have the courage to share.

Then, in 2013, my words emerged into the world from a burn unit, after an email I sent asking for help began making its way beyond the friends I had sent it to. Eventually, I started a blog to keep everyone in the loop.

And people started saying something I hadn’t quite allowed myself to believe:

You are a really good writer.

And the encouragement that came out of the hardest experience of my life felt like hope.

So what do you do when words start waking you up in the middle of the night, when you’re staring at a crack in the ceiling and trying to write your way out of wherever you are? When becoming a writer starts to feel less like an ambition than a way forward—the only way to make sense of a story that feels too strange to be living?

I bought every book on writing I could find.

I worked with that coach. I took the courses. Did all the writerly groups. Started blogs. Published articles all different places. But above all, I kept my butt in the chair like my life—and my sanity—depended on it.

For decades now, I’ve been writing stories. Some new. Some of them over and over again. They’re archived by year in Dropbox, scattered across my desktop, buried in folders and versions and documents and journals. I recently had to upgrade my Google storage because apparently I have accumulated too many words to fit in the amount of space allotted for free.

Which, strangely, felt like a big deal.

Not deleting. Not paring down. Not deciding I had too much.

Just making more room.

I call this glorious mess my writing graveyard.

It’s where bad first drafts go to be buried—and, every once in a while, resurrected, as life keeps moving faster than I can write it.

I’ve been writing in the margins of motherhood for so long that the daughter who first made me a mother is heading into her senior year of high school.

This means two things:

1. I have a lot of feelings to feel these days about what is coming.

2. I have seventeen years of words I thought would eventually help me make sense of it all—the spiritual experience of motherhood, that is. They haven’t. At least not in the way I thought they would.

So where do I even begin?

The question is practical, but the crisis beneath it is existential: how do I whittle down the enormity of what I feel and think without diminishing it? How do I give shape to something without pretending it was ever that tidy? How do I choose what belongs without deciding everything else didn’t matter?

Thankfully, at least here on Substack, I already have.

First with the dream that opened this space I called The Artistry of Faith in the spring of 2024, six years after I had stopped sharing my writing when we moved to Hong Kong in the spring of 2018.

And then almost immediately, Mary Magdalene took over.

What began as conversations with my best friend became The Magdalene Thread, then a podcast, then essays, then a book we thought would be simple and was anything but. For nearly two years, we did little else but research and write, which explains the long silence here.

Then, on July 22, we published Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat—the book that finally made me an author.

It is notably not a memoir, but a 420-page work of historical nonfiction about Mary Magdalene, and with it I shared an essay here called Why I Wrote a Book on Mary Magdalene, which barely scratched the surface of how I came to write it, much less the story of writing my way through motherhood to Mary.

And then, in the strange post-publication space of wondering what I was going to write next, I kept seeing red dresses.

Mary Magdalene in red. Priestesses in red. Initiations and archetypes and all sorts of things on Instagram that were getting under my skin for reasons I couldn’t quite explain.

Until I realized I had my own red dress story.

One I had written and rewritten in various forms for years, buried somewhere in the oldest reaches of the writing graveyard.

So I went back and found it.

Twenty-four years ago, I was eighteen years old when I walked down a runway in a red dress and became Miss New Jersey.

It felt like it was finally time to tell that story.

So I did: Why I Won’t Put on a Red Dress and Call Myself a Priestess: From Miss New Jersey to Mary Magdalene, a story 24 years in the making.

And maybe that is how I am going to write this memoir after all.

Not by figuring out how to wrestle seventeen years of words into the right order or any sort of sense before I let anyone see them.

But in essays.

The stories that feel ready to be told, when they are ready to be told.

Some pulled from the writing graveyard. Some written now. Some I’ve been circling for years without understanding why I couldn’t let them go.

One at a time.

That’s what you’ll find here.

Subscribe and they’ll land in your inbox roughly once a month, with one caveat: I am apparently incapable of writing the recommended bite-sized Substack essay.

I settle into a story somewhere around 4,000 words.

So that’s what I’m going to send you.

And if you want to go deeper, there are a few other places to wander around here.

For paid subscribers, there is The Good Within Our Midst: Writing Hope in a Burn Unit, a book that gathers the original writing I shared from the burn unit in 2013 alongside reflections I wrote in the fall of 2024 on resilience, motherhood, faith, and the power of narrative.

There will also be A Book of Love, about 101 messages from God received by Sally Johnston, my traveling companion during my year as Miss New Jersey—and the Sally at the heart of the story I began telling here. Decades later, I would become the unlikely editor and steward of those messages. More on that soon.

And if Mary Magdalene is what brought you here, you’ll find the research, conversations, and ongoing work Kelly and I share over at The Magdalene Thread.

If you want the more about who I am and how I got here, there is always the About page (which, naturally, I turned into a story).

Otherwise, I think seventeen years is long enough to wait.

Let’s begin.

That night, sitting beside William in the Burn Intensive Care Unit, I picked up my phone and wrote an email to my closest friends asking them to help me through what I could not imagine enduring alone.

Eleven days later, I began a blog.

Over the weeks that followed, I wrote nineteen entries from William’s bedside and through the birth of my third child. I hold a master’s degree in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied the science of human flourishing. When I began writing from the burn unit, I had no idea those words would become the beginning of my life as a writer—or that I would one day return to them, considering what I had studied against what I had lived: perspective, resilience, motherhood, faith, and the stories we tell ourselves when life does not go according to plan.

The Good Within Our Midst gathers those original writings alongside reflections I wrote in the fall of 2024. The original entries are a record of how I wrote hope in a burn unit—using words to find and hold onto the good within my midst—while the later reflections consider what that practice of perspective, resilience, and narrative came to mean.

The title comes from the Gospel of Mary, an early Christian text attributed to Mary Magdalene:

“That is why the Good has come into your midst.”

Years after the events chronicled here, the questions this experience stirred in me about faith, prayer, miracles, and the unseen would eventually lead me to Mary Magdalene—and to co-author Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat: Stories, Symbols & the History of Mary Magdalene.

I bring this work back now as a published author, recognizing in it the place my writing life began. I have chosen to keep it here, within The Artistry of Faith, as an archive of that beginning. The original blog included photographs, but I have removed them from this edition to preserve what belongs privately to my son and our family.

What remains are the words.

This book is available in full to paid subscribers.

Continue to the Introduction: An Email Changed My Life

→ Read the Introduction

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The final entry in Chapter One is a short blog post titled, “Out of surgery and resting”—a milestone in William’s journey of healing that leaves a million words unspoken about the lifetime lived through his graft surgery.

Of course, I can only recognize this no…

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It’s a four letter word with great meaning that I best understand as the feeling of warmth, lifting me away from the cold depths of despair.

Scientifically speaking, hope is described as an upward spiral, connected with the positive emotions that serve to broaden our awareness and build connections—but it floats in small moments of varying significa…

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I remember composing thes…

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Eleven words emphasized by five exclamation points written on a sticker from the nurse’s station. I found it on the wheeling bed stand next to the bucket of ice chips and snacks on the morning of discharge from the burn unit.

I knew then that the words of my favorite night nurse were a treasure.…

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I write these words on a quiet fall morning as I listen to the wind blow and the leaves release from the trees. Before me in the west, I watch the clouds float by—transforming into shapes I imagine to life in my mind with words I might form into stories.

“Don’t worry about the how” is what I’m now inclined to s…

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The mountains caught that fleeting alpenglow, their ridgelines brushed with soft pink light. Below, the National Elk Refuge stretched in broad bands of sagebrush and autumn grass.

Inside a labor and delivery room, my newborn rested warm against me, skin to skin, as the last color faded from the valley.

Making it through the passage of birth brings relief, but it’s fleeting. In that small space between pregnancy ending and motherhood beginning, whether for the first time or again, you recognize that the child you carried is now a heartbeat outside your body, completely dependent on you in a new way.

Relief barely has time to settle before the questions begin, each one stoking the fires of anxiety.

He had been so quiet at birth…too quiet...

Was he really the thriving baby boy they insisted he was?

Did I even remember how to care for a newborn?

Would I fail to keep him safe?

The truth is, the fear does not dissipate. It simply changes shape as they grow, through all those moments you notice they are unfurling into life beyond all the control you never had to begin with.

No, there is no outrunning the chaos of motherhood, with its swirl of dichotomous emotions and the constant expansions that drop your stomach like one of those rickety wooden rollercoasters at the Jersey Shore—the kind you new better than to ride.

How then do we cope but by finding our way to the eye of the storm—a quiet center within ourselves where peace is still possible?

Peace in the sleepless nights when the hours blur together because sleep training failed, or you did—somewhere amidst all those great expectations of how to be a “good” mom.

Peace in the aftermath of an accident you will replay a thousand times wondering how it all could have, should have, gone differently.

Peace in the face of shame, through both joy and loss, and during the upheavals that send a family across the world on a one-way ticket to a new life.

Yes—even in turbulence, there can be peace.

Peace is a choice that does not mend what is broken, erase the scars, or take away the grief—but it offers a moment of relief. A breath that gives hope a chance to rise, should we dare to allow it.

But sometimes peace simply arrives, carried by a baby whose presence settles into a reality once deemed impossible—the aftermath of a worst-case-scenario birth giving way to the best-case outcome, because the baby you did not expect arrives safely, and a wave of oxytocin moves through everything, inviting you to receive the moment.

So I breathed in the levity of that miracle against the fading pink sunset—Theodore, whose name literally means gift from God—and steadied myself with gratitude as foreboding rose alongside my joy. When my attention settled on what was here instead of what might be lost, even the smallest graces seemed to glow, like the “candlelit dinner” that arrived after I made it through birth.

It was a delight I once would have thought too good to be true after my previous deliveries in New York—but here it was. Steak, because this is the West, where cowboys still ride along the Snake River herding cattle, and a milkshake to wash it down, which one of my nurses assured me was practically medicinal after she had done the same following the birth of her own child in this small-town hospital.

Battery-powered tealights flickered softly on the tray table beside me, their gentle light holding the room now in place of the sun. Theodore slept on my chest, silent since his arrival, as if he himself were the calm that settled over me.

All of it pooled into an aftermath vast and luminous with relief—a peace now large enough to hold both the mystery of life and the edge it rises from.

The stillness lingered for a little while longer, and I tried to stay inside it, willing the calm to last.

But the door swung open.

The night nurse—new to me—came in with the bright energy of someone just starting their shift. After introducing herself and straightening a few things near the bed, she eased the meal cart back toward the doorway. I remember watching the candlelight recede, reminding myself not to begrudge my sunset moment ending.

Returning to the bedside, she glanced over my chart and offered a quick word of congratulations for pulling off one of the hospital’s first VBACs. I nodded, knowing it never got easier to sign that form with all its listed risks. But by the fourth time through, the VBAC itself no longer felt like the remarkable part of the story—even though my original OB had insisted back in 2009, on my first day of motherhood, that my hips were too narrow to ever deliver vaginally.

The nurse’s eyes drifted to the whiteboard across the room, where they kept track of everything in marker, from blood pressure and temperature to the first feeding and diaper counts.

“Did you know that another baby boy was born today at the same exact time as yours?” she said, gesturing toward the board.

I followed where she pointed and saw it written—“Birth time: 1:53 p.m.”

At first it seemed like nothing at all. Of course babies must share birth times. In a busy urban hospital, where so many are born each day, it would hardly seem surprising. But this was a remote hospital without even a NICU, and between the VBAC and concerns from earlier pregnancies, my doctor had ordered blood for the delivery and recommended helivac insurance—precautions that, thankfully, went unused.

In a place like this, after all that had been warned of, weighed, and carefully prepared for, the coincidence felt magnified. Somewhere just a few doors down another mother was cradling her newborn who had arrived at the very same minute as mine. And yet, for all the ways birth can feel immense and solitary, it is also utterly ordinary. It is universal. And sometimes, against the odds, it is miraculous.

Before I could ask more about the other baby or the mother holding him, she was already turning back toward the door. “I’ll let you get some rest,” she said, pausing briefly. “We don’t need to do vitals until early morning, but I’ll check on you throughout the night.”

And then she was gone.

I found myself alone again with Theodore, who had come into the world at 1:53 p.m.

1–5–3. The numbers settled in my mind, but they did not register as anything significant, even though numbers often did.

Over the years I began to notice patterns—signs and synchronicities that seemed to appear at strange and meaningful moments. Sometimes in numbers but often in colors, symbols, and coincidences too potent to overlook. What began as curiosity slowly became my own way of paying attention—an attempt to make sense of what had happened and believe that something might be guiding the story when no religion or spiritual system I reached for could fully explain the sorrows, close calls, and miracles I had experienced by the time I found myself (already a mother of four who believed her family was complete), unexpectedly expecting yet again.

Given the circumstances of this pregnancy—one I would never have dared to try for—I had begun to trust a more unusual kind of logic.

It began with five.

“Of course you heard the heartbeat” a familiar cab driver in Hong Kong said the day he rushed me to the hospital when I thought I was losing Theodore, seven weeks along, just one day before we were moving back across the world to Wyoming—and waited there to drive me home again.

“Five loaves, five fingers, five children” he added as I slid back into the red taxi.

He turned toward me holding up his hand, all five fingers spread wide, eyes bright with excitement.

“Five is a very good number in my culture.”

As he turned back toward the road, I noticed the red Chinese talisman with tassels swinging gently from his rearview mirror, and in that moment I decided the Jesus-loving driver in Hong Kong—who had ever so accurately nicknamed my thirdborn a “talking dragon”—could very well be the prophet of my becoming a mother of five.

Or perhaps it had been my daughter all along, because after returning to a home dismantled for our move on the afternoon of her tenth birthday, I found myself standing before the framed drawing she had made me on a day of loss. Her indigo flowers had once beckoned me out of bed, becoming my garden of possibility, carrying me through the threats to my fertility and on to the birth of my fourth child whom I believed was the completion of that story.

Like women who have lit candles and kept household altars for centuries, this was mine—the last thing I would pack, tucking it carefully into my carry-on alongside our birth and baptismal certificates, my grandmother’s copy of Simple Abundance that had followed me from nightstand to nightstand since I was sixteen, and a one-way ticket to another new life in Wyoming.

Only then, in the bare space that comes before letting go, did I count them:

Five.

Signs that I was safe—and somehow guided, that my life might expand beyond my dream of four children to five, despite the medical risks—continued throughout the rest of the pregnancy. Whenever my composure faltered, I would “hear” a number, like the day I walked into a prenatal appointment and watched the baby’s heartbeat match it exactly as the monitor flickered to life.

And for reasons that defy easy explanation, it was the number seventeen that kept returning, as if insisting that everything was unfolding as it should. By the time Theodore arrived, seventeen appearing around his birth did not surprise me. Rather, it felt like confirmation of what I’d come to trust through the ordeal.

Looking down at the small, faint cross inked on my left wrist, which the tattoo artist had called “a single pass” when I told him the mark was personal, I remembered why I had put it there. It had never been a declaration of certainty. If anything, it marked a question.

For years my sign of the cross remained just that—two simple lines meeting at a point I could never quite resolve. Now, with Theodore here, I could see my faith made manifest, even if I didn’t yet have the words for it—much like the persistence of the number seventeen.

I studied the details of his tiny face, noticing what was different about this little one. He had a big upper lip, but the infant musk—the smell of moss and sunshine—was the same as always, so vivid you think you will remember it forever, though it fades as fast as they grow.

I wanted to stay there, just watching him breathe. But the number the nurse had pointed to kept returning to me, insistent. It felt charged, like a clue I hadn’t sought but suddenly couldn’t ignore.

I was torn between savoring him, my desperate need to sleep, and the pull of curiosity. If I slept, I would need to put him down, and I wasn’t ready for that just yet. And besides, even if I closed my eyes, I knew I wouldn’t unsee the way she had pointed to it, as though it mattered.

So I reached for my phone on the bedside table beside the cup of ice chips—now melted into the water I was finally free to drink at will.

Three keystrokes into Google: 1-5-3.

The first result was a Wikipedia entry for 153 (number). The opening line read:

“153 (one hundred [and] fifty-three) is a natural number and integer following 152 and preceding 154.”

Ordinary enough.

But the next line caught my attention:

“It is the sum of the first 17 integers (making it the 17th triangular number), and also the sum of the first five positive factorials.”

Seventeen and five.

I had never heard of a triangular number before, but learning that 153 was the seventeenth—my number—and that it was also connected to five stopped me cold on the very day I became the mother of five. It felt like a synchronicity bursting with meaning. I wanted to tell someone, but how would I even begin to explain it?

Did I even understand it myself?

The entry showed a chart explaining its mechanics: dots arranged in triangular rows—1, then 3, then 6, then 10—until the seventeenth triangle held 153. It fascinated me, even as it made my head spin. Still, I kept scrolling.

Below it, a series of tabs began with In mathematics:

“The number 153 is associated with the geometric shape known as the Vesica piscis, or Mandorla.”

The strange Latin name made me pause.

The vesica piscis was the almond-shaped form created when two circles intersect, long used in sacred art as the halo or luminous frame surrounding holy figures. It was exactly what I had been reading about the night before while waiting for the Pitocin to kick in.

I stared at the small screen, stunned. The need to confirm it—to prove I wasn’t imagining things—pulled me upright as the thought crossed my mind to finally put Theodore down and retrieve the book from my overnight bag across the room.

I set my phone aside and swaddled him in the hospital blanket with pink and blue baby footprints, before gently placing him in his plastic bassinet. The small card attached to the edge read It’s a Boy, followed by his name, mine, his height and weight, the doctor’s name and of course his birth date and time.

1:53 p.m.

After everything I had just read, seeing it there again almost felt like the universe winking at me.

Suddenly I couldn’t move fast enough to fish the red book out from beneath my nursing bras and the little outfit Theodore would wear home. I flipped open Mary Magdalene Revealed to the earmarked page where Meggan Watterson describes that same shape on pilgrimage:

As we entered the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, where the Red Spring is protected in a walled garden, we walked over a mosaic of the Vesica Pisces made from beautiful white polished stones. This ancient symbol of sacred geometry represents the third that’s created from integrating two opposing forces, two seemingly irreconcilable opposites.

There are two circles of equal size and identical shape. And where they overlap creates the most ancient symbol of the divine feminine, the Vesica Pisces. It’s an oval, or an egg shape. It’s the shape that surrounds Christ in most images and icons of him.

Now, I wasn’t on a physical pilgrimage searching for the divine feminine. But I had just passed through labor and delivery, through pain and fear, to bring forth life from the darkness of my womb. Even in its most medically managed and modern form, the process remains profoundly sacred and feminine.

I stood there newly risen from the bed where my baby had been born, holding a book about Mary Magdalene, a woman from the Christian tradition I knew little about, aware that the number I had just discovered and the figure in those pages had somehow arrived together, though I could not yet see the connection.

I set the book on the bedside table within arm’s reach, scooped Theodore from the bassinet, and climbed back into the hospital bed, settling him into the nook of my left arm.

With my phone in the other hand, I returned to the Wikipedia entry, scrolling through the rest of the mathematics tab, trying to make sense of the many numerical properties attached to 153, before opening the tab titled In the Bible.

And there it was.

“The Gospel of John (chapter 21:1-14) includes the miraculous catch of 153 fish as the third appearance of Jesus after his resurrection.”

I tried to rationalize what this meant, but despite my cradle-Christian beginnings as a Presbyterian, a year spent as an adult confirmand in the Catholic Church practicing Lectio Divina with Sister Teresa, the sermons I’d heard at the Church of England in Asia, and now as a churchgoing Episcopalian in Wyoming, the deeper symbolism of John 21 was about as hazy to me as the Pythagorean theorem from sophomore geometry.

The number seemed to touch all of it at once—the sacred shape of intersecting circles, the mathematics of triangular numbers, and the scripture’s own strange specificity.

Numbers. Symbols. Story.

Jesus on the shore after the resurrection, a net straining with 153 fish that did not break.

And Mary, the one called Magdalene.

The convergence had an oddly coherent, almost familiar feel to it—as unexpected as a cab driver once counting out loaves and children on his fingers in a red taxi on the other side of the world who, in the end, proved prophetic.

Numbers and synchronicities were something I had always kept separate from Christianity, part of a language of intuition I had learned to conceal. Yet somewhere deeper than doctrine I sensed that goodness could appear beyond the boundaries we are taught to keep—whether in the sacred reds of Buddhist temples where I found solace while living abroad, the red talisman swinging from the rearview mirror of that taxi, or the red book about Mary Magdalene now lying beside me on the hospital bed.

Red and Mary Magdalene.

That is what I typed next.

What appeared was a swirl of fragments—stories of a red thread, a red egg or robe, even red hair—a color long associated with fertility and the mysteries of women’s bodies.

I didn’t know what to do with any of it, much less how it might belong with the number the nurse had pointed to on a day already marked by blood and birth. But it all felt strangely miraculous, like a net straining with fish—153 exactly—and somehow still holding.

So I let the questions rest and finally closed my eyes, breaking the rule about putting the baby down to sleep because I was thinking about the alpine glow from earlier—and the way red softens into pink when a little more light slips in.

At last, I knew we were safe.

Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat

At high summer 2026, on Mary Magdalene’s feast day of July 22, Theo is nearing the end of his seventh year of life.

Seven years since that hospital room. Seven years of following a number, a shape, a color, a woman burdened by history with seven demons. Seven years of wondering why Mary Magdalene had arrived beside my newborn son, and why 153 left me oscillating between the pew and yoga mat in search of truth.

I can say now that I have not solved it so much as followed it—a mystery that has only become more vast and complex with time and attention. And on Mary’s feast day—22/7—I find myself back inside the old approximation of pi: the number of the circle, the irrational number that refuses to end. It belongs to geometry, yes, but also to the nautilus, the pinecone, the fern unfurling. To the spiral. To the mystery that keeps opening as it turns.

It is, much like my search for the meaning of 1-5-3, all that cannot be contained.

And perhaps that is why this quest to know Mary—to follow her—kept unfolding beyond the reach of my human hands and the conditioning that had taught me who she was allowed to be.

Mary as witness. Mary as the one who sees. Mary as philosopher. Mary as the Beloved Disciple. Dare I even say, Mary as the living source behind the Gospel that greeted me at Theo’s birth?

The deeper I followed her through history, scripture, symbols, the more she seemed to surface in the everyday moments of ordinary life: in ideas that arrived in the shower, while stirring dinner over the stove, while idling in the carpool line or on a sports field, in artwork pulled from a backpack.

Mary was everywhere, in every moment, embodied so long as I remembered to breathe while moving beyond every boundary I had ever known. Yes, she kept leading the way whenever I was willing to look again, along a path that taught me to choose love over fear…

So it seems that frightens me is often what is asking me to grow.

And while there is so much more to this story, today…on Mary Magdalene’s feast day…I can finally tell you this:

I wrote a book!

Yes, my first book—Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat: Stories, Symbols & the History of Mary Magdalene, is now available.

Fishing became my answer to Theo, to 153, and to Mary Magdalene, the woman whose story found me through that number.

But the most beautiful part of the experience is that I did not write it alone. My best friend Kelly Ingraham and I spent two years following these questions together, discovering how deeply the story had already woven itself into the tapestry of our lives.

Long before I ever recognized the significance of 153, Mary was already at work. She stirred between my husband and me as another pregnancy asked more of us than we thought we could give. She echoed in the words of the cab driver in Hong Kong who counted out five loaves, five fingers, five children as he carried me home in the red taxi. She startled me into attention when a nurse pointed to the whiteboard and told me another baby boy had been born at the exact same moment as mine. And finally, she drew together friends—two mothers—trying to understand what had been hidden in plain sight.

Maybe that was the point all along. Revelation does not arrive alone, because it asks to be witnessed, and then shared—just as Magdalene proclaimed, “I have seen the Lord.”

And so it moves through the space between us: between mother and child, friend and friend, reader and page, the seeker and the story that suddenly begins speaking back.

For where two or more are gathered…

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Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat is a deep dive across the Bible and beyond it, following Mary Magdalene through scripture, symbol, history, myth, the feminine divine, and the Mother long hidden from view. Its title comes from John 21, where the risen Jesus stands on the shore, tells the disciples to cast the net on the right side of the boat, and the net rises full with 153 fish.

From a miraculous catch to a number I could not ignore to the woman I could not stop following, I leave you now with all the magic I still cannot quite explain, waiting for you in the pages I spent seventeen years dreaming of writing (yes, since 2009 when I became a mom).

I hope you’ll read it, and more than anything, I hope you’ll tell me what it opens in you.

xo,

Alicia

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.

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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 its 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 ancient wisdom:

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, a 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 casts a dark shadow.

When the curtain closed, I stepped 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.

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. 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. Each autumn, I bow to impermanence 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, 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.”

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.

Motherhood is the place where that intuition sharpened. The strange, sacred world of caregiving where miracles and mess exist side by side, where time dissolves into sleepless nights and small wonders, where love stretches beyond anything language can measure.

In that world I began to recognize motherhood itself as a spiritual experience, something close to the varieties William James analyzed and gave language to. The mess, the joy, the losses, and the quiet miracles slowly transmute into something like courage, and courage has a way of asking questions. So I wonder out loud about the unusual connections my mind likes to make.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Marty Seligman’s epiphany in his rose garden—the moment that helped initiate the field of positive psychology. There’s something about that image that stays with me: roses, and their long association with the feminine divine, carrying a kind of resonance with the heart. Not as abstraction, but as something felt—something recognized.

This emotional cauldron at the center of my being is the source of the love I hold my children with. The heart chakra I first encountered through yoga, and later studied in my training as an energy healer, is where I feel those empirically validated positive emotions—states shown to broaden perspective and help build a life worth living. Love is an ancient and universal language, but modern researchers are now studying heart coherence, beginning to scientifically describe its influence on our health and wellbeing.

Blending science, spirituality, and physiology—with even a touch of philosophy—is nothing new. But what happens when I follow that thread further? When I trace it from the rose to Mary Magdalene—a woman misunderstood since the origins of Christianity?

Since following her rose-scented legend all the way to a cave in France, I connect a red thread from her words about “the Good” in The Gospel of Mary to Seligman in his rose garden of “inherent goodness.” Then, another thread stretches to my studies in positive psychology, and my thinking begins to come full circle.

Weaving is a process of bringing threads together. They meet slowly, forming a pattern that makes sense of what once seemed separate. I return to it each day, gathering what I can.

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 coffee finishes brewing, 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 froth a little whole milk into pillowy cream and take a sip of the silky bitterness of café au lait 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.

Stunned by her presence, I watch as she moves across my desk and disappears in the windowsill. Then I pick up my pen and begin to write.

I try to capture the moment—the strange synchronicity—with words that move 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…

These are just words, until I spin them into the sentences I will weave into stories.

May we rise, heal, grow, flourish, and create the hope we seek.

For this is the artistry of faith.

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If This Resonated…

For more about Mary Magdalene, you can head over to for essays and conversations on Mary and the sacred feminine.

The Magdalene Thread

The stories, symbols, and history of Mary Magdalene

By Alicia Assad & Kelly Ingraham

The questions that drew us toward Mary eventually became the heart of our first book:

In Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat: Stories, Symbols & the History of Mary Magdalene, Kelly Ingraham and I follow the surprising journey those questions opened through scripture, history, art, symbol, and pilgrimage—in search of a woman whose story still has the power to change our own.

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