In the early hours of June 16, 2011 Our Lady first appeared in Woodstock, NY.
Below is an excerpt from Waking Up to the Dark by Clark Strand
I was about to leave the house for my walk when I felt the weight of a hand on my shoulder and a voice said, “Don’t go out tonight. Remain calm—and very, very still.” This I did, positioning myself lengthwise on the couch beside the downstairs window, looking out on the moon, the darkness, and the stars.
The night was unusually beautiful, the weather just this side of cool. I’d have loved to walk, but I’d heard the voice before—spoken softly, but clearly, in some innermost room of the mind. Some people would be frightened at such a thing, but I never was. Maybe it comes from having spent so much time in the dark. In the dark every voice could be the voice of an ancestor or a spirit guide. In the darkness, who can tell the living from the dead?
I quickly entered a place of such quiet that I cannot remember having any thoughts at all—or at least a state in which the thoughts are so few that you can see them coming, like the traveler you witness crossing on an open plain on foot whose approach is visible from a long way off. It was the state one sometimes experiences in those hard-to-describe in-between stages of sleep, except that I was awake.
After about forty-five minutes like this, my breath caught in my throat because someone was there I hadn’t seen coming.
I felt a presence directly to my left and opened my eyes. There beside me was a girl of about seventeen years old. Her face was pale and moonlike, with a few freckles around her nose. Her eyes were hazel, her auburn hair cut short. Over her mouth someone had placed an X of black electrical tape.
I can tell you to the last particular what her hair and face and eyes looked like—the shape of her mouth and her nose. The glow of her face, which seemed lit by something like candlelight, although the room was completely dark. But if I did that you might still imagine her as a vision.
Was she? I asked myself that question repeatedly later on, but the answer was always no. I didn’t know what she was. Nothing could have prepared me for her. Nothing could explain her. I knew that what I was looking at was the face behind every experience I’d ever had. It was as if the rest of my life had been a vision, and she alone was real. I’d have said I was looking at the face of God if it wasn’t the face of a girl.
I could tell that she was desperate to get the tape off her mouth, but for some reason could not do so on her own. Her eyes were urgent, pleading. And so I leaned forward and gently pulled it back from her mouth. It came off with some resistance, the way tape does when it is attached to flesh, but not so much that it would have caused her pain. I could feel the pull of her lips and skin against it as I peeled.
I was careful not to actually touch her. I cannot explain now how I knew this, but there was something dangerous about her in her “bound” state. Terrible things might happen were she violated in that condition. Later it wouldn’t matter and we could touch, but not that night. When the tape was off she gave a quick, deep gasp, as though until that moment she had not been able to breathe. It was a strange sound that didn’t fit the size of her body—like the rush of air into a vast crypt, or into a cavern that had been sealed for thousands of years.
At that sound a spell seemed to have been broken, and I opened my mouth to speak. But she shook her head once very slowly to indicate that for the time being nothing could be said. During this whole episode her eyes never once left mine.
After that I lapsed back into stillness and quietness as before. Why, I couldn’t tell you. But when I opened my eyes again three quarters of an hour later, she was gone.”
Our Lady continue to appear to Clark and to offer guidance and wisdom. On August 22, 2011 She would invite him to pray the rosary with the words, “If you rise to pray the rosary tonight, a column of saints will support your prayer.”
Soon after the first Way of the Rose circle in Woodstock, NY began as well as our lively Facebook community.
Our Lady still speaks publically on the 16th of every month.
The complete story of her apparitions can be found in The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary