Conservatives would like for us to learn the Hebrew Bible and abide by it as the rules for our lives. I grew up with it. My name is in Jacob's prophecy, "Until Shiloh comes.” I am female. I knew as a child they didn’t like females, and later I saw that the curse in Genesis occurs at a reference to my name, of course in a sacred grove. I dearly love the forest where I live, the Lincoln National Forest.
The opening of Willa Cather's novel Death Comes for the Archbishop follows the path up with references to the Jornada del Muerto of a red rock terrain and which is near my home in New Mexico. It is the description of the bishop arriving. (My father was a minister.)
"The blunted pyramid, repeated so many hundred times upon his retina and crowding down upon him in the heat, had confused the traveller, who was sensitive to the shape of things. “Mais c’est fantastique!” he muttered, closing his eyes to rest them from the intrusive omnipresence of the triangle. When he opened his eyes again, his glance immediately fell upon one juniper which differed in shape from the others. It was not a thick-growing cone, but a naked, twisted trunk, perhaps ten feet high, and at the top it parted into two lateral, flat-lying branches, with a little crest of green in the centre, just above the cleavage. Living vegetation could not present more faithfully the form of the Cross. The traveller dismounted, drew from his pocket a much worn book, and baring his head, knelt at the foot of the cruciform tree."
That road is just miles outside my front door. There’s a 400 year old Juniper tree there.
Michelangelo painted the entire Sistine Chapel Ceiling about my name, from the front door to the back wall, which also happens to be about my last name. He painted it in the years matching the verses of Genesis 49: 08-12: from 1508 to 1512, on purpose. (My name is in 49:10, which contains my birthdate and John Mayer's.) On the 500 year anniversary in 2008, unaware of this, I walked into Willa Cather's photograph of herself in front of a cathedral from a balcony in Santa Fe. John was singing "No One" with Alicia Keys that night at the Grammys. We were about to come to know each other.
Reading Further
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Speaking Out
Liam Payne was very kind to me and I owe him this in speaking out about the all-encompassing, overwhelming pain he wa...
'Upon This Rock'
After Willa Cather published The Professor’s House in 1925 which contains her “Tom Outland’s Story” about the cul...
