“Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention-the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage
I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here
among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.
The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?
My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forget to tell.
Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.”
~Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time

Several weeks ago now I wrote in this space about hearing this poet speak on the radio and how I was drawn in by the title of her book, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. After ordering it right away, I waited while it took longer than most books do to arrive in the mail. This made me smile. We are so accustomed these days to having things show up with lightning speed that the fact that this book took several weeks amused me. Perhaps we should have to wait longer for such loveliness…….the appreciation becomes so much more.

Countless times people talk with me about prayer….not knowing how to pray, wondering what prayer really is, what words to use and what words not to use, does it ‘work’, now it does so. Often I am at a loss as to what the ‘right’ answer is to their questions because I not only do not consider myself an expert on prayer but also I always feel as if they are searching for a definitive, correct answer that I believe no one has the power to give. The formulas exist…..wise people have written and described practices of prayer……words have been offered by others to help us along in our prayer life……but basically I am of the ‘there is no right or wrong way to do this’ camp. There is simply your way, my way.

This poem gets at what is most likely the real problem we have with prayer. Time…..too much, too little. Distractions….too many to count and our tendency to follow the next shiny thing that crosses our path, that leads us away from being still enough to connect with that Breath that moves through us, that holds us, that fills us every blessed moment with Life just as the mystics promise. They were, are, the ones who experience time differently, are able to focus on the rise and fall of the Life Force in ways that bring that connection we all long for but miss in our distracted ways of forging ahead in the moments of our days, which, of course, become our lives.

This life, with its days and nights filled to overflowing with the ‘complaints’ we mount up, can be all we have to let sift through our fingers at the end of the day, as we drift off to sleep. Often we have allowed the connection to slip past us, the rising and falling of Breath, going nearly unnoticed, used only as the fuel to propel us forward into the next activity, the next detail to cross off our to-do list. Our days can become ‘a story we forgot to tell.’

Unless…..unless….for one moment, or two, we stop the flitting, the frantic movements that give the illusion of living and allow the One who breathed us into being to be our focus. We make that connection, that deep connection that holds us, that has always held us even when we are fickle and look the other way with our important and busy lives. In and out we breath…remembering who we are, why we are here, all the beautiful and fragile lives with which we travel, the terror that can grip us and the world, and the gentleness and love that is available, always available, with each connection with Breath.

Prayer……….