confession: i have always prayed. during early adolescence when my agnosticism appeared, i continued to pray without addressing my prayers to anyone outside myself. repeating mantras during meditation came easily to me and began in conjunction with my nascent agnosticism. mantra meditations were newly familiar in their prayerful form. throughout decades i’ve often wondered to whom or what i am praying. i’ve always understood why i pray. praying centers and soothes me. this morning i realized for the first or the thousandth time that my prayers are addressed to my own heart. each prayer is a conversation. my mind speaks. my heart listens and responds with the calming comfort of its slowing heartbeat.
confession: reading another person’s poem or fiction or memoir feels like listening to that person’s prayer, a prayer secretive and quiet lying in wait underneath the story, waiting to be recognized.
confession: currently i am reading a book that is shifting the sand dunes upon which i’ve set my life. because of its page-by-page impact pacing through the maze of my psyche, i want to give a copy of this book to everyone i know who has ever contemplated suicide. i want anyone who has spiraled inside the mystery of one’s own self to read her story, listening for the prayers underneath. i found this book in the free box outside my favorite thrift store a few weeks ago. i tore off its cover because someone had stuck blue chewing gum to it. this 25-year-old yellowed coverless paperback copy is the most important book in my possession at this time…and the thing most meaningful to me that i could give to you if you asked me for what matters. alice koller wrote an unknown woman in 1968 about months spent living alone on nantucket during the winter of 1962. she didn’t kill herself. she’s still alive. more than any author i’ve read, i want her friendship, but in her desire for privacy and solitude, i understand that she wouldn’t want mine. i love that about her. the truths she wrote and published in this memoir before i was born support me as much as any friend can. reading her book, i affirm my own intention for writing. i write because i want to love-in-action everyone i encounter inside, outside, and through my writing. i want to love them with my words, my stories, my heart on the page. i want every reader to know she and he is loved. we give out of our greatest need. i give from my quenchless need to be the love that i long to share, feel, extend, and multiply.
request: however you feel about the holiday this week, please sit with me for one breath. breathe love with me for one full inhalation and exhalation. ahhh…i love you. thank you for letting the love in.
angel joy's musings 