What is Prayer?

Blueberry Soul Food

Prayer, for me, is the simple act of noticing.

Simple but not easy. It is easy to get tied up in the knots of knots. To vibrate in the trance-like static of trying to change your channel. Simple requires paying a different kind of attention.

My soul has ached for poetry lately. It is undoubtedly how I pray. To write it. To read it. But mostly to see what it is pointing to and rejoice that I am not dead. Lately I have felt dead.

It is Sunday morning and I am glimpsing again, for the first time in a long while, the flickering of desire. I woke up knowing I needed to make blueberry muffins.

I never made them until two years ago, two years after my mom passed away.

There was no need.

My mom made the best blueberry muffins I, or anyone who had the good fortune of knowing her, has ever eaten. Though deliciously respectable, mine do not compare. But that is not the point.

My first few batches were a dismal tear-filled event of not measuring up. But my latest dozen having been moving subtly in the direction of secular communion.

A kind of humble invitation of her into the daily experience of our lives.

Joe and I reading the New York Times, bowls of coffee by our side, the boys watching cartoons, Floyd, our dog, under our chairs, his head on my toes.

Each of us digesting our muffins in a separate space, in the bubble of our own being, but all of us together as family.

I am a poet first. I keep forgetting this because it is not popular. Few care. And there always seem like far more sensible things to do with my time. More charitable, valuable, meaningful things.

Like studying mindful awareness to teach to children, searching for new ways to get green into the kids diet, helping strategize new business for the agency, scheduling fall lessons for the boys so nothing falls through the cracks.

I forget that my recipe for communion is made of words.

It is not a choice. Some people are born to be bakers. Some rock stars. Some poets.

A robin cannot be a bluebird. And a Fennec Fox cannot be Terrapin Turtle. If only we could embrace our feathers, shells and fur. The choice is simply whether to pretend and disappear or explode into our own wild authenticity.

My Recipe for Blueberry Muffins

You can substitute yogurt for vegetable oil

to conserve on fat. Dismiss the myth that

doesn’t make allowances for new. Be wary

of living in the brackets of someone else’s story.

Break the yolk open with the rounded tip

of an everyday spoon, golden yellow sun

unleashed across the dry white sands of a plan,

stir into the wet white wonders of yogurt and milk.

Too many blueberries are barely enough.

This is most important. Many sins can be

covered with a generous heart. Fold in carefully

but do not worry about breakage. Perfect tastes fake.

We each have a recipe for how we pray. Mine changes daily. But sometimes I grow so fat with darkness, my imagination can barely breathe. I am beginning to breathe again.

To remember, for me, prayer is not a list of commandments but a practice of walking through the moment with eyes, heart and mind as open as they can be.