hidden and emptied

The hidden breath of faith

murmurs a lonely

little prayer

in the unmoving cave
of my emptied
heart. Listen to its silent

passion and

surround its shape

with your radiant

Paschal love.

©Laura Sorrells 2015

all rights reserved

Snow Day the Second

Snow Day Number Two. The house is warm and secure, but parts of it are what you might call ‘broken.’ It needs so much work. Essentially it is solid, but I see the places where restoration needs to happen, where cracks and shifts show me what it needs. Brokenness is sometimes just a pain in the ass, but it can also be beautiful. As I sit and look out over the snow-touched landscape of the mountain forest outside my window, I see the beauty in the brokenness of the big hornets’ nest falling apart in the cold winter air. I see it in the psychedelic vibrancy of the top part of a glass Victorian gazing ball I once had on a stand in the front yard. Now the glass ball sits atop the glass table on my snowy deck and captures hints of the shapes surrounding it. I notice the shards of a broken cup, pale green and cream colored with strands of peat-brown. I remember when an old boyfriend of mine, a man I almost married, bought me that cup at the local Arts Center. There were tiny insects—not ants, more like candleflies or termites, but not quite those either---all over the larger, deeper pieces of pottery on the table with the cup. There was something haunting and curiously compelling about their presence, there in the sharpening air of late autumn. I think now too about the brokenness of memory, or its potential brokenness. Who can say when a memory’s life becomes broken? Perhaps it never fully does. I do know that the courage a person with such a memory can have is more powerful than many other things that are, or seem to be, fully intact, whole, and undamaged. The way such a person asks kindly and respectfully for the favor of a phone call for information, over and over even after the information was acquired and written down in two places, can begin to break my heart. I think of the patience that question entails. Its asking implies that that question has already, perhaps, been asked and not acknowledged or responded to. It does not harbor irritation or anger in the context of that. It just, quietly and lovingly, asks again. There is something about that echo that reminds me of the grace of prayer. I am not sure if I am thinking about the listener or the one who is praying, or maybe of the Voice of God and the one receiving that Voice. Maybe it’s a dialectic of both. Maybe the asking and the answering are so closely connected that they can become almost the same. I don’t know what that would look or sound like. Maybe that coming together would obliterate the need for asking, but maybe not. Maybe the asking would carry its own grace, its own respectful, adoring petition for inclusion in the heartbeat of relationship. There is, inherent in all of this, a sweet brokenness that, paradoxically, is not truly and finally broken at all, at least not in any sense that keeps out what needs to get in or keeps in what needs to be released. This Lent, living into that heartbeat seems to be what I need. I don’t know how to define it or describe it more concretely or adequately. It wants to come to live in my heart, and I want to let it. That’s all I seem to need to know for now.

©Laura Sorrells 2015

all rights reserved

who?

Who says these
dangerous, lonesome
prayers? You talk
like a creek feasting
on mud. Because of
this conversation, my
life has become a
thirst, a surrendered
flag trembling
in the generosity
of your breath.

----©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

a season of smallness

Christmas is coming. I’m not feeling it. It’s been years since a truly childlike joy has pervaded my experience of Christmas, but this year there is an emptiness that frightens me. A few months ago I wrote about the “experience” of emptiness that I had at Arabia Mountain in June. It was really more of an experience of joy at being opened up. This is not like that. This is scary. There isn’t the whisper of silence to comfort me. The breath, the textures of the silence I’ve known of late aren't exactly those I associate with "true" silence but of a defiant,willful, stubborn wall. It feels alive almost at times. Right now when I write poetry, or try to, I struggle immensely with the words. The tenderness I have felt so strongly for God these past two years is reluctant to help me. Indeed it almost isn’t there. Being in the woods, alone with my camera and notebook, is a way of being with that tenderness. It doesn’t mean I feel it. The closest I do come to feeling it right now is when I’m teaching. Last week my students turned in the poems they wrote. Found poems, like the ones on my blog, and metaphor poems. “this mountain, this fire, this pencil, this song.” The poems shout and murmur with beauty. With the unexpected. Their courage takes my breath away. That is the closest I am coming to praying right now. Reading those and feeling gratitude that I helped birth them. I do say “thank you” many times a day, and I mean it. I don’t think I am angry at God. Perhaps I am, but that doesn’t feel like an explanation for this flatness. I know there is so much grief still there in my heart, mostly for my beloved and complicated mother, who died in 2004, but also for the failure of love. For my inability to love a man as I have wanted to. I don’t seem to be cut out for living into that love. I suppose part of what that’s about is that I am too selfish. But it is also beginning to be about thoughts of the frightening but sometimes compelling possibility of some sort of solitude in a protracted, long-term way. Still, I try to live in the moment, to be present to it, and when I can that is a grace. I wrote something years ago about wanting to be with a man who could “endure my solitude,” as the singer Nanci Griffith put it. I have yet to find this person. And I have put some energy into yearning and search. So possibly that is part of the hollowness this winter.

At any rate, what I do with this wall is what seems to be important. I think it is crucial that I do not pound my fists angrily on it. I can even name it. I have at times called my longing for God, for Christ, for Spirit, into it. I did that tonight driving home down the mountain in the rain. I thought about the cinnamon color of the sky around the browning forest’s top and I loved it. I felt a pang of passionate love for God just watching the rain fall on my pickup truck’s windshield. And then it went away and I began to cry. I found myself wanting the cheer and the abundant spirit of Christmas. The celebratory largesse of it. In truth I don’t want that, though. I suppose I think I should want it. But really what I love on Christmas is silence. Simplicity. Last year I went to the monastery for Christmas Eve and spent the night there. I put my bag down in the little room where I slept and loved its smallness. It felt so right. Little, austere, humble. Almost vulnerable somehow. Christmas felt then like a wreath of simple winter branches unadorned, like the receptivity and yearning of my favorite Christmas carol (actually an Advent song): O come O come Emmanuel. O come, thou Day-spring, come and cheer our spirits by Thine Advent here. I loved Christmas in the slowness of those syllables and of their dance with Advent candles in the secret part of the night. I have felt such resistance to the glitter and pomp of Christmas. For me the time is more about smallness, longing, hunger, emptiness, vulnerability, simplicity. Receptivity. Waiting. The love that has yet to be born, or borne. The child. Incapable of celebration in human terms. Naked, probably, or close to it. Just present in the human world, incarnate, hungry, breathing.

another time

The last time I stayed up all night I was so excited about getting up before 3 a.m. to chant psalms at Vigils that I couldn’t sleep. I sat on my bed in my little room in the guest house of the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where I was on retreat and read a little from Kazantzakis’ novel about Saint Francis of Assissi and tried to meditate. Saint Francis has always been a vitally important and iconic figure for me, singularly compelling even before I began this part of my spiritual journey. I remember reading part of the Kazantzakis novel, for instance, back in Athens, Georgia, in the spring of 1996, not long before I left town on what felt like a whim to me at the time. I had been full of fear and despair then, and the book had been inexplicably comforting to me. I think I put it aside pretty fast when I moved in with my mother in the little mountain town where I still live now, some seventeen years later. At any rate, I didn’t sleep at all last month, that first hot July night on retreat at Gethsemani, even though I was exhausted from the long drive. I went into that odd, liminal space where shadows play games with the edges of a person’s eyesight and sounds sing songs that aren’t there. I know I was just really tired, but I felt keenly alive and powerfully happy. Almost giddy with joy, really. The monastery church there has a specific scent, as does the one in Georgia, an aroma that is both earthy and austere, but in a totally different way from the granite and evergreen and moss of Arabia Mountain. Not wild like a landscape but not exactly domesticated, either. I went into the church a little early and sat in the back, where the retreatants sit during the liturgy of the Hours, and just waited for things to begin. It was very dark, very quiet. The silence was broken by almost nothing, only a few small sounds here and there, just the settling of wood, the whisper of small wind against glass, and the breath of the body of everything, dark and kind and unknowable and empty in the absence of song and speech.

prayer poem before coffee

The world's empty garden
opens to me, a
prayer that wants to
bring me the
living vein of
love I have
longed to breathe
every morning.
Its season is this
prayer's only
moment, a
hatching, a light,
an everything begging
for surrender.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

kindled

Listen for the secret name
of God
that the sky prays
in April.
Something wild
and shining follows me
across the dark roof
at night.
My kindled heart
cracks into
lace and marble,
a silent room waiting gladly
for the auspicious weather of Christ
to meet me,
carrying nothing, new-born and
empty as light.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

I got this found poem mostly from Annie Dillard's beautiful book Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, which I just ran across while looking through some old books of my mother's.

morning prayer

Reverence draws out bliss.

Let the heat of the water on my neck in the morning be an engine for a righteous fire on behalf of my best efforts, my kindest impulses, and my truest hopes.

Let the taste of Greek yogurt and Grape Nuts I share with the dawn chorus remind me of every sweetness possible in the yearnings of sunrise over Sharptop.

Let the conversation I have with the barista who’s overwhelmed with latte orders be one of grounding humor and understanding.

Let the laughter I share with my students before the day begins be a chord of play and a cord of openness between us.

Let the hour I have to myself in the middle of the morning be a space for reclaiming my breath and honoring right livelihood with a little bit of stillness.

Let the ears I hear my students with be fresh and free of any judgment.

Let the air I share with the leaping deer in the meadow off Mineral Springs Road be clean and salvific, the kind of air that tells its own stories and makes them easy to hear, cool with coming October.

Let me understand my role in the sweep of the day with tenderness and fire, with patience and a lover’s soul.

Amen.

This is something I wrote several years ago and tweaked tonight. 

rediscovered the night before visiting Gethsemani

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Thomas Merton

I was already familiar with this prayer but rediscovered it quite by accident tonight in one of my late mother's old computer folders.