Last month I started a new project called - a newsletter where I write a prayer everyday for a year to then self publish them into a daily prayer book next year on the Summer Solstice. The experiment of writing every day publicly doesn't scare me and I feel able in my time and capacity to carry on with the project.
My writing however feels incredibly boring. How many ways to pray can there really be? In order to complete the project I must find 365 different ways, each one unique to the day and the season.
I find myself repeating words like god, benevolence, capacity, spaciousness. I wonder if I am just saying the same thing over and over. I don’t worry about boring the readers as much as I worry about boring myself. Selfish perhaps, but much of my writing practice is for the self.
I ask myself if this should have been a private practice, but I am certain I would have already skipped a day. Like water I ripple through.
I spent the last week in the town of Trout Lake in the house of a friend’s family friend where a rushing river flows through the back yard. Sleeping to its sound every night was a prayer. Trying to get the pizza oven to work was a prayer. Touching the moss was a prayer.
When you are tethered to god everything is a prayer.
How do you write the way it feels to dip your hands under the running water of a rock wall covered in flowers? How do you write the way it feels to eat an apple and stare at a waterfall? How do you write the way it feels to watch a man scope out the terrain for his little dog and his wife so they can safely join him at the water’s edge?
There are no words for these prayers. They are internal hope poems. They are glimmers of the mind. They are somatic experiences that can’t be repeated with language.
I remain to pray. I will continue to commit to this strange project. I will continue to read my daily readers and connect every day with god. It may include questioning the purpose of the work, but if there is one thing I know it is that you can show up to the page without confidence and still do it.
For Palestinian Fathers, Sons, and Brothers : On the Western erasure of Palestinian men's lives and dignity. by
I am teaching QUILT IN A WEEKEND again June 29 + 30 from 9-1pm PST / 12-4pm EST both days and I’d love to have you!
New Wings, we web in solidarity : new years, continued fights, flight and collective sumud by
31 Reflections at 31 : Liberation is Breathwork, Let Us Blow It All Down by (perhaps my favorite list EVER)
Started reading Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years by
This banger
Writing to this lately
I’m enjoying filling my days with 1:1 Creative Advising Sessions - book one here and lets vision your summer xo
I liked this episode with
Another perfect poem by
