Tag: Prayer

Sunday Morning

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‘We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will…Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.’ Simone Weil.

Our Simone once took me to task over my ‘sneering’ about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It’s admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour. She spoke as if all this were obvious. I longed to understand her. It feels always that I am on the edge of some comprehension here but never breaking through to the other side.

At night, just before sleep, is when I am closest to reaching it. In the morning, when the birds start, belief is as thin as the light.

— Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional (Riverhead Books, February 11, 2025)

Notes:

Recommended.

Book Reviews:

Sunday Morning

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Inspired this morning by the “Phenomenal Women Empowerment Alliance” group. 5:50 to to 6:20 am. August 25, 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. Thank you Sabrina and Friends. See more pictures of the Women Empowerment Alliance group here. And amazing sunrise scenes here.

Morning Prayer

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I wake up in a blue room and panic for a moment because I’ve forgotten where I am. Curtains with delicate floral patterns and tattered hems bend the shadows of iron bars. The adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, moans though the windows. I brush the curtains aside and the damp air and words of the salāt al-fajr, the dawn prayer, spill in. Islamabad spreads out below me as clumps of dark shapes, interrupted by dots of orange and green. A streetlight. A kitchen window. A barking dog. The soft, sticky sound of tires on wet pavement. Several blocks away, the minaret of a mosque pierces the sky, illuminated against the darkness, and the muezzin calls out from the too-loud, tinny speakers. I can’t understand the words, but I appreciate how they compel a quarter of the world to fall to their knees in prayer five times a day.

— Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within (Random House, July 9, 2024)

Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Driving through rural Mississippi, I felt my shoulders drop. Suddenly I was smiling. On a dappled road between weedy hedgerows and piney woods and cotton fields and country graveyards and shabby crossroads towns without so much as a blinking yellow light, I was singing along with Tyler Childers and smiling like a fool.

I was home.

I don’t mean literally. I come from Lower Alabama peanut-farming stock, not Mississippi cotton farmers. The first time I ever set foot in Mississippi, I was 22 and on my way to New Mexico, eager to shake the red dirt of home from my sandals as fast as I could manage.

But those small clapboard churches where cars park right on the grass, and those rough farm roads yielding to blacktop, and those blooming, insect-bedazzled margins between fields, and that splintered light pouring down from the pines — they were all telling me I was home. And I was so happy to be home.

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,” writes the poet Mary Oliver, “don’t hesitate. Give in to it.”

I believe she’s right — “Joy is not made to be a crumb”— but for a certain kind of Southerner, it’s impossible not to question this particular happiness. This place has caused so much suffering. How could loving it fail to provoke questions? And yet the sight of cotton growing in fields made me happy. For those few hours, even knowing the terrible, blood-soaked history of cotton, I couldn’t help it. Happiness rose in me like an anthem. […]

Drive down a highway in your own homeland, the golden autumn light pouring around you and the golden leaves tumbling in the passing rush of air, and tell me your heart doesn’t fill up with love and longing. Tell me you could keep your heart from filling up with love to the throbbing point of longing. Even a heart entirely broken comes back for more breaking when the source of heartbreak is home. […]

I will keep on loving the place that made me, for I seem to have no choice about that. Because when the muted gold of the pine needles and the extravagant yellow leaves of the elms and the mottled orange leaves of the sugar maples and the shining red leaves of the black gum trees are all falling out of the sky in the passing wind, it always feels exactly like a benediction.

—Margaret Renkl, from “Notes on Going Home” (NY Times, November 20, 2023)

DK Photo @ Cove Island Park @ 6:25 am this morning. More photos from this morning’s glorious walk (in the cold wind chill) here.

Walking. On Sunday Morning.

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It’s not the red car, but the black sedan behind it. Shot was taken this morning from across the cove, from a distance. At the start and end of my morning walks, I pull in here to take my first and last shots, but not today. Heavy cloud cover, and…

1013 consecutive (almost) days on this Cove Island morning walk. Like in a row.  It’s brisk out, 28° F, feels like 23° F.

For the last 6 (?) months, mostly every morning, the black sedan is parked here, overnight. Car running, exhaust drifts upward, condensation drips and pools on the asphalt. 

Who are you? What’s your story? Sleep here by choice (not really ‘choice’ with rents at nose bleed levels)? Bad decisions? Bad luck? Working 2 jobs, banking cash for better days ahead? Continue reading “Walking. On Sunday Morning.” →