How strange, I walked with the dogs out into our woods – the snow finally melted enough to be able to walk out there – and I crossed the Gulley bridge and sat on the meditation bench and listened to the waterfall. And I found myself in prayer.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Red up on the hill, watching me, waiting for me. He is a spirit dog, he understands prayer.
I thought of Maria and sent a video of the stream to her, I don’t know if she got it or not. She is so far away. Last week, I prayed for a wonderful trip for her. She had one, although I don’t assume that my prayers are ever answered.
I know I cannot wholly embrace the dogma of any single religion, my mind just doesn’t work that way, I can’t be told what to think, I can’t worship somebody else’s God, embrace someone else’s dogma.
Yet I am deeply drawn to the spiritual life. I find myself praying all the time, including today. In recent months, I pray more frequently.
I am fending off the anger and anxiety in the air, staying grounded in my own truth.
In an odd way, this has been a good time, surprising and rich. I know who I am and what I wish to do. It doesn’t matter to me what everyone else wants to do
I am very much alive and engaged in the world, my senses are alert, my mind opened up. Sitting on the bench, I realized that for me, prayer is my life, not a verse from a book.
Our in the woods, the rushing stream was my prayer the hawks in the sky my prayer, the dogs were my prayer, the trees and the stone walls, the wind was my prayer, the snow on the hillside, the donkeys braying, the dogs running.
Thomas Merton would say that God was in all of these things, and maybe so, I don’t really know. I like that idea of God.
He wrote that prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone. Sometimes I feel the world around me turning to stone, minds all closed up and angry, people awash in grievance and resentment. Prayer and compassion turn the stone to love.
A good time to pray. When I pray, like when I work, the dogs enter into my spirit and lie down, still.
I miss Maria, obviously, but I also feel liberated by the silence around me this week and last. I am not involved in the mechanics of my life, or the arguments beyond, but in the living of my life. In my life I have found a for of prayer I am easy with and open to, a kind of prayer in which there is no distraction. I love solitude, it is where I find myself.
At times, I see that my whole life is a prayer, my silence is a prayer, I don’t have to think about it or recite it or memorize it, it is all around me. Solitude and the world of silence I experience out on my bench and in the world deepens my prayer grounds me.
It is so hard to describe, but so powerful an experience. It is calming and peaceful, it is beautiful and honest and it is always there. It is not something I can find on my computer or I phone, not on Facebook or Twitter.
Prayer is the simplest thing, all I need is me. The rushing stream is nice, too.