It appears my enemies are working overtime, considering my great-grandmother’s rosary and my Kindle broke on the same night. Maybe it was my duende, who’s been messing with the Kindle since my last post. As you may have gathered by now, I believe in many things, especially the inexplainable.
Mateo just gave me a bowl of chopped play doh and said eat your food I’m going to sit on my chair with your water that’s the deal and put on a movie.
The Kindle is replaceable, the rosary is not. Its pendant, where my thumb rests as I pray, holds tiny specks of dirt encased in glass. Beneath the soil, it says Jerusalem. I always have it on hand while traveling — reinforcements are essential in this post-pandemic hellish airport landscape, not to mention the toddler in tow. Last year, when I showed it to my cousin he ran to his car to show me her prayer book. It’s 100 years old — all the prayers are in Spanish even though her native tongue was Arabic. We remain incredibly attached to her, and each other. His name is Alex. In another life, we were siblings, and she was our mother. Madre.
I’m going to fix it. I’ll order a new Kindle. I keep it moving. Holy shit those are your two prized possessions in life my sister says over the phone. I tell her it’s fine because instead of having a nervous breakdown and crying hysterically about it, I didn’t.
Detachment continues to be a theme in my life.
It feels like something good is coming. Maybe my enemies are busy. Maybe they’re all in my head. Maybe it’s my angels trying to get a hold of me. The Way of Perfection has been trying to get my attention since I ordered it a year ago. Teresa most likely wrote the first draft in 1566. The book made its way into my home in 2023, where it sat on a shelf wrapped in plastic, until now. Did she break my Kindle?
The book’s three main principles: love, detachment, and humility.
I agree and disagree with so much of what she writes. I think it’s the Catholic trauma — my childhood confessions with creepy Irish priests, watching the nuns grab kids by their ears during lunch. The mean nuns were replaced with nicer nuns and my younger sister experienced it all so differently. But I’ve always been wary of the nuns. So why am I so interested in this one? For the past year it has felt like she’s trying to talk to me.
I am not sure when I was first introduced to her, my memories are known to deviate from reality, but probably in fourth grade during the All Saints project. There were no Alexa saints or Yasmin saints so I went down the list for “A” and my sister’s name is Annette, but there were also no Annette saints, so I chose Anne. Saint Anne — patron saint of grandparents, mothers, married couples, and the infertile. I wonder who picked Teresa. Not Mother Teresa. Maybe Isa Avila was Teresa.
It was on the same trip to New York, last September, where she found me again. I was rummaging through an old bag of mine, in my old room in Brooklyn, when I found a prayer card with her face on it, from a funeral I never attended. I took a picture of the prayer on the back of the card, made it my phone background, and put it on the fridge when we got back to Cabo.
Teresa was born on March 28, 1515, in Ávila, Spain. An Aries, like me. Her editors were called censors. The vibe of this era was that a woman should leave her house three times — to be baptized, to be married, to be buried. A skeptical environment to write in, particularly as a woman and especially for a mystic. She’s aware of this and in The Book of My Life her self deprecation is, to me, insufferable. The Way of Perfection was written four years later, and edited (censored) by a less strict Spanish friar. “What is the matter with Christians nowadays?” she boldly asks in Chapter 1.
In 1559, Spain's Inquisitor General published an Index of Forbidden Books, targeting those related to prayer. Conservative theologians feared that mental prayer might encourage a shift toward Protestantism, the imminent threat of the time.
I put the book down because I can really only handle a couple chapters a day. It’s a study edition and I don’t recall signing up for class. But I love it.
I stumble upon The Point’s latest issue, an essay titled Schooling Myself.
Elisa Gonzalez, who read Dostoevsky before the age of ten, shares her upbringing in a religious homeschool setting. She compares the act of learning to the feeling of falling in love, reminding me of Teresa, reminding me of myself. What feels random is all a part of her lesson plan:
“Though I was only six when I was first branded disobedient and stubborn, my habitual sins, I tolerated many years of teaching that my life’s great adventure would be to support my husband’s, and submit. Always submit. I revolted elementally, like a body rejecting a transplanted organ, but I didn’t see many options, which is probably why, between about ten and sixteen, I told adults that I felt called to celibacy and researched becoming a Protestant nun.”
The only difference being the flavor of Christianity, it appears that 500 years have changed a woman’s role only slightly — at least in a religious context. In the mainstream, however, the pendulum has indeed swung.
Elisa goes on to say, “I always have a private set of curiosities that I’m lazily investigating,” and if that isn’t girlhood in a nutshell. I used to think girlhood was for other girls — the ones with big friend groups, Toll House cookie dough always in the fridge, perfect handwriting, working on adorable crafts, and making their spaces more beautiful. I love these girls. But girlhood for me is the dark interior. It’s always the private curiosities I’m lazily investigating. It’s always Cuba, astrology, Appalachian folklore — which has me spiraling about the Helene devastation — Alaskan winters, star-crossed lovers, and more recently — the works of St. Teresa of Ávila.
Happy feast day queen I imagine texting her, every October 15th. Two days after I gave birth.
I can’t believe it’s already been and has only been three years. I am so proud of myself for the foundation I am building as a mother, a woman, a writer. I am so proud of myself. It has taken three years to adjust to calm. I’m not fixed, I was never broken. I still catch myself craving fires. I lose my favorite nude Skims bra. I pick at old wounds. The rosary breaks.
The fear of losing restricts abundance. Surrender. If you don’t tomorrow’s eclipse will do it for you, whether or not you believe in it.
My morning cafecito read! I love you, and your genius.
Loved this!