Read Online Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd - Free Book Online

had the sensation of time slowing. A whitewashed church sat in a courtyard filled with fuchsia oleander, red hibiscus, date palms, lime trees, and terra-cotta jars overflowing with feathery orange flowers. Several nuns sat outside their apartments making what appeared to be lace. The serenity was narcotic. “Greek Eden,” someone in the group said, and sure enough, behind the church, we found the Tree of Life. It was an immense myrtle sacred to the nuns, purportedly a thousand years old. It held itself in an elaborate yoga posture, its serpentine limbs bent into mind-boggling contortions. I noticed crutches piled near the trunk, with a back brace and other orthopedic apparatuses that looked like they, too, might go back to the first Byzantine period. Rosaries were tied to the branches next to hundreds of tin votive offerings or tamata , hanging like drooping garlands. Ribbons, cards, jewelry—even wedding rings—dangled from the limbs. No one spoke—all of us a little dumbstruck by the sight of a massive, old tree decorated with so many inventive prayers.
    Catching the smell of beeswax candles, I wandered around the tree to find tapers burning in a metallic shrine box. That’s when I saw the huge, glass-plated icon perched in the branches. Panagia Myrtidiotisa , the Virgin of the Myrtle.
    Her legend holds its own among the most lavish Greek stories of miraculous, walking, talking icons. It’s said that after the Turks destroyed the convent in 1821, the surviving nuns heard a voice calling from the tree and discovered the Virgin of the Myrtle. They carried the icon into the church, but that night she escaped back to the tree, where they found her the next morning wedged happily in the branches like a tomboy returned to her true element. This went on and on. Eventually the nuns gave up and left her out there.
    A short, black-clad nun found us staring at the icon. She greeted us in labored English. “You ask her for the thing at the bottom of your heart, yes? The Virgin will give it. Then you give to her something.”
    As I studied the dark-skinned Madonna, her face as brown as the tree bark, her headdress bright red, I had a flash of the Mary in my dream with her red scarf and dark skin. Even the thick glass covering the icon reminded me of the train window. In the spirit of pilgrimage, we all decided to ask the Virgin of the Myrtle for what lay discarded at the bottom of the heart, the thing half-known and half-allowed. When I stepped beneath the limbs into green, phosphorescent light and tingling tamata , I was unsure what I would pray for.
    To my surprise I blurted: “I would like to become a novelist.”

    Hunched over my journal in the wan light of the cathedral, I look over the experiences with Mary that I’ve collected—the motif of leaving her behind; the recognition she could be larger than the human Mary, unconfined by religion and imbued with meanings that have long been associated with the ancient Goddess; how she showed up as a dark, feminine divinity, a Black Madonna; and finally, the way she was connected to my desire to write fiction.
    I will come back for you.
    Mary crying in my dream, living impoverished and quarantined in my soul, reminds me suddenly of Mary in the Tinos icon, begging to be dug up from the uncultivated field. I can’t deny the inner behest in all this. It seems more than possible that the piece I’m missing in my spiritual life is a single image of devotion. Is Mary my “grain of sand”?
    If I penetrate to the center of Mary’s image, perhaps I will find a new center of myself. Isn’t that what iconic images are meant to do—bring us into encounters with our own deep selves? My heart and my gut tell me that the night-skinned, fierce-eyed, tree-loving Mary will help lead me to the inner sanctum of the Old Woman, that she has something to do with my rebirth as an older woman. I can’t explain this to myself. I only feel in intuitive, indeterminate ways that she will have a