9/9/10 - Prayer
I've been reading a lot of comments online about prayer and language. Prayer that is carried like the wisps of a mist up a mountainside into the clouds. Prayer that floats through the minds of people and unearths as secret thoughts when our guard is down. Prayer that finds its way out of holy books and whose letters spill in random places in our newspapers and novels, on billboards and on the sides of buses, in memos that we read on email at work, a mismatched ransom note to the world, in and of prayer. Prayers that are taught us by the animals we choose to live with, our companion animals who actually shepherd us, rather than the opposite. Prayer that travels in the wind, lightening our burdens, our lives, our songs, that turns green in a season and ages with stems and cascades and harvests. People are buying all kinds of holy books and reading them, to learn, to hear the voices of animals and angels, and to pray.

Prayer is about silent longing, what we keep in our vases, our vessels, in small boxes around our homes. Prayer is a voice addressing the Infinite, the Infinitesimal, one moment of one being, and all of creation. How is it that we happen upon this word, this trial, this random spill of hope and fluid? I trip and stumble like water over the stones in a brook. I pray every day as though I am all the letters in the universe's alphabet. I open my heart to these words of peace, of place, of the passing of time noticed by the stars.