Stepping our of the box...

How You Pray

“So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outward. So this is how you pray.” Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver writes about prayer a lot. Not the “Our Father,” kind of prayer, but the silent woodlands, turtle sliding into dark water, owl on silent wings kind of prayer. The kind in which one is immersed in the moment, and in the beauty of the natural world. She writes, for instance, about the cry of a loon:

                          “...you come every afternoon, and wait to hear it.

                           You sit a long time, quiet, under the thick pines,

                           in the silence that follows.

                          As though it were your own twilight.

                          As though it were your own vanishing song.”

                                (“The Loon on Oak-Head Pond”)

If that is not prayer, I don't know what is. She writes of water lilies:

                                       “...the muskrats swimming

                                         among the pads and grasses

                                         can reach out

                                         their muscular arms and touch

                                         only so many, they are that

                                         rife and wild..." (“The Ponds”)

We should all be so gifted at noticing, and having our hearts open and fill with joy at the sight. Mary Oliver writes, “I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful and … almost involuntary in my life.” She sees, and cannot contain her gratitude. When we step outside the structures we've built for ourselves around what prayer “should be”, we are able to enter into it with our whole being.

                                           In the Spirit,

                                                Jane