I think, in a lot of ways, the act of sitting down and writing a blog post on Frozen Spaghetti is more or less how I pray.
I am not really here to teach you anything or be profound in any certain way – it’s just…. I am a writer and a poet and I love dictionaries and Bibles and hot tubs and roadtrips. I love packing cooler bags perfectly. I understand the spiritual science of numbers and am obsessed, for lack of a better word, of that deep internal shifting that happens when you practice stillness.
And I think that because I love and am those things… sometimes it helps you out. God helps you out through me somehow, amazingly. Like – what a gift to my life that my honesty in my words somehow is a gift to others.
I love talking about the elements and relational math, too. Last night, my husband and I were talking and he asked me if I like understanding people individually or understanding people as a whole. I didn’t think about it long, but my immediate reaction was…. both?
Because, to understand the individual (has a body, is alive, has a mind, has intuition, is divine) is to understand the collective – to understand the collective (that all individuals have those 5 aforementioned layers) is to immediately understand the individual.
This year, I turn half way to 90. And I have a lot to share already at this part of my life. Things I really know help shift perspective or at least give people a glimmer experience that reminds them (on some level) that they are able to be known or maybe even known.
The idea of being known is really on my mind a lot these days. As I dug deep into some content on my last trip to St. Croix and you see, this content I have been studying for literally decades and in digging deeper, I was met with something new. New ideas that really shaped my spiritual understanding and my ability to be present. (Side note – how quickly this spiritual understanding can be overridden by the broken human need to defend, explain, justify, etc)
The experience I had in St. Croix taught me that the Spirit (God – connected everything – universal Peace) can only be all the way known in its mystery that you can’t know everything. Or something like that.
As I sit here at my writing station – binder full of restorative yoga sequences and their elemental vernacular – mug of coffee on the south facing window sill – cut glass crystal bowl of 3 x 5 cards and dry erase markers for the whiteboard hanging below my vision board – I realize in my worry about what to write and where and to whom and to what end is best put into a present moment processing here on my age old blog. This blog I have had since I was gosh – 28??? Holy smokes! So long ago. So many posts put on draft mode to be re-read and re-published (at some point, at it to the list) with intention.
But it brings me back to the title of this post – that there is no wrong way to pray – and whether it is the shower you take or the propping up of the feet or the song you play when you prep vegetables or whatever, right? Like – anything can be understood as your way of interacting and requesting of the divine. So…. what are you asking for? What are you inviting? What are you recognizing?
For me – I am asking for clarity this year. I am inviting in an editor or lit agent or something somebody to help me corral all of this thought (the notebooks!) that are changing people’s lives. Like I am no longer wondering if this work is meaningful – it is meaningful – it is strengthening and encouraging and is coming from God. Like…. none of this is mine. I get that. I am also inviting in the ancestors whose healing work continues through mine. And the ancestors who got the baton to the next generation in my blood. My Swedish line like… let’s go. Aren’t you geniuses? lol
Don’t you know how to make households with little tiny things? (Ikea joke in case you didn’t get it)
Anyway – and I am recognizing that everything in my life at this half way to 90 point is in my life. It’s meant to build on. I don’t think I am in a cutting out or shifting around phase I know I am not in a place of “I better get my shit together” (although, that thought comes).
I think (and I believe this for others, you – probably, if we were to talk) that the most important thing we can do is give credit to all of our days. David (husband) and I were also talking about the inclination to replay the past and account for the timeline and is that really necessary over claiming the present? A “here’s where I am now and what I value and so hereby are my decisions going forward” kind of thing.
Like choosing Frozen Spaghetti today as my first stop in my writing time as an active way of praying as a meaningful place in my life. It’s like using that thing in the basement you have been storing. Writing on this old blog is in a way no longer being a digital hoarder.
On that note, feels like the skids are greased (is that the saying?) and the writing can commence in the book that I am committed to. Today, I take a note from St. Theresa of Avila’s playbook and humbly state in the work where I am starting and decide who it is for.
From Thursday’s personal retreat… nothing like a Bible hot tub fresh pen notebook combination.
Frozen Spaghetti 