Prayer

Now I sit in something like an attitude of prayer, elbows on the table, palms pressed together, index fingertips to my nose, and search for words, or the right words. There's a thing about impermanence that my mind cannot leave alone every day just at the moment. A thing about the passing of time, and how I see it in the faces and bodies of those close to me, and those around me. The idea that we are all marching towards the grave. Nothing new about these thoughts, for me, for anyone, but a particular tone to my current preoccupation. A sense of something slipping away from me, a sense of inevitable ending... to everything. A sense of unreadiness.

Something too about woundedness. About hurt and how we work out ways to survive it and go forward to the next thing. And how I have always tried to hide my hurt. How hiding it has not made it go away. How again and again in the twists of my story my hurt has returned in different disguises and tried to make me listen, tried to make me unmask it, let it live in the light. How I've tried to do that but still always ultimately believed that the end goal of all that was to leave it behind, to get beyond it. How I now glimpse a way forward that is inclusive of all my hurts, and all my griefs and all my fears, all these parts of my experience I have thought I had to leave at the door when I went to work especially, but even when I went into the social world, into love and friendship.

I am three and I am eight, I am fifteen and I am twenty-five, I am thirty-seven and I am fifty. My losses and hurts have pierced my heart with unimaginable pain, have floored me, have left me feeling I have lost everything and will never get it back. They have shaped me, have limited and expanded me, they have shut me down and sometimes they have opened me up. They invite me to open up.