Here is my Christmas shrine to Mary of Calendaria. She came to me in the RSPCA shop in Todmorden – a picture on plastic plate souvenir from Tenerife. She is a syncretic black virgin. Her statue became a focus of aboriginal belief on the Canary Islands, before a Christian re-visioning as the Virgin Mary. She appears around the world accompanied by common motifs: being washed up from the sea, or turning the aggression of the men who discovered her against their own bodies. I have put eggshells around her. Mary of Candelaria is bold and powerful, as well as the mother and healer. The shells are a reminder not to take care, as well as to take care, and to wonder how to walk the impossible line between the two. I turn the eggshells upside on their ends, balance a candle inside and I light the candles. Illuminated ruins.