Prayer For Slowing Down
Today I’ve been watching the shadows move across the white building that was once a barn and now is used to store dishes and tables and chairs, because we have too much of everything, and the window frames make a fine white line in the black reflection of glass, speckled with new paint, like ancient stars, and all day the shadows have drawn themselves on the clapboards and told the old story of light, how it dances in our eyes and how we praise it, how it is fleeting: here, then gone, like the river outside my window, all last night rumbling and thrashing, fluid beyond imagination, transporting last year’s leaves and silt from forgotten fields.
Water Prayer
And this morning I awoke to rain, which makes its own rhythm on the window, and the world is full of these rhythms, rhythm of water, rhythm of the heart, which sounds like an underwater pump, the lub-dub of all it knows, which is making all I know possible, and on the roof rain falls and turns to hail, then snow, then rain again, running down the shingles to the gutters, the gathering-up that makes rivers and lakes and oceans, from cloud to drop to torrent, how nothing is lost.
