Prayer & the CommonWoman

Prayer is not necessarily a comfort zone. Prayer is where you go toe to toe with God. Human perceptions do not always apply here. How many have defined God to a perception? Is your God big enough to forgive that which you yourself cannot – atrocity, harm, pain, disability, disinformation? And if your God IS big enough, are you? Can you forgive a God Who forgives these?

Does your God only dwell in that which you consider positive – the newest of life, the best of life, the “god-given” of life? It is among the largest of minds only where God dwells within the most life-denying. That’s my boundary: if it is a denial of life, there is no God there. But the definitions here slim into invisibility, boundaries slip & waver. Yes, the devils are here among us & hide behind brittle facades of good works while undoing these very efforts, binding them with red tape & a powerful taint of “you’re not good enough to succeed.”

How do we overcome this? I love the thought of an unlimited God, but the boundaries I have set for myself rub up against that perception since I live in a limited body. God can fly, I can’t. God needs no physical food, I border on gluttony at times. God allows all I find distasteful or to be of an excess beyond reasonable, I bark & howl at the leash I’ve set upon my own neck by not enlarging my vision so. However, my “only human” status has encased my power-full, enormously loving, capable, miraculous being into a tiny membrane subject to gravity, to a need for energy replacement, to all to which God seems so much larger & more magnificent as to exempt Itself from.

And still.

I come up against / go up against myself in a brutal mirror when I pray. I admit to what I do not believe I am while knowing I am that. Somehow I balance it out to feeling better from prayer rather than finding myself lacking. I know this is because the confrontation that takes place makes me better for simply having walked up to it. It follows me out of the room whispering & guiding me into zones where I wish to remain since they seem to keep my “better side” more accessible to me & available to everyone else.

Prayer tells me “nothing” is not. Prayer tells me demons can be cast out, the unlife seeming manifest all over can be diminished into nonexistence – which is from whence it springs anyway. Prayer is in-form-ing me to be a more successful, huger, force of energy which only creates a betterment of everything touched. Prayer flies me when I my feet are laced in gravity boots, prayer shuts down my physical hunger for spiritual sustenance, prayer allows humanity to show off in all the ways I find too loud or too noisesome. Prayer tells me being an everyday heroine is my happy place & tells me this is not the hardest place in the world to live from.

Prayer hurts, heals, has. Prayer is an energetic moving me forward when I just want to stay where I am in my own funk, fugue, fog, fear.

Communication is the only function of humanity. Prayer is that with my God, so fiercely personal & inhumanly possible that this me barely tolerates being in meditation.

Where do I go from here?

October 23, 2022 2

Apotheosis

PRAYERS OF THE TRAVELER

The priest, the postulant, the penitent

Evoke the random ministrations

Of universe, pointing at my sins & laughing

The Pastor said, “don’t follow your heart lest it lead

To falsity…”

But I’m just not that independent; I need heart to

Shine my way, to filter my thoughts, to bring me

To the altar where I will not kneel, but

Reach instead my arms to God

With my heart outstretched, elastic

Ready for the learning, for the leaning

Ready for the love to flow from me for me

So ready for the love, God, the magnification

Of who I am into who You are

Not boasting, but becoming the outpouring

Of all You have shared with me

That I may express You with my life

With actions, speech & understanding

“Know thyself to know God.”

APOTHEOSIS

I play in halcyon days

Ingesting, digesting

Parsing, praying.

Offsets of accomplishment

The truth of divine mind

Made manifest by my actions.

Even this far along in life

Rich with effort, rife with falling short

The paths of life forever circular

Still, I strive like salmon reborn upstream

After flying against persistence

To be recreated

In Your image.

A PRAYER AT 5:15 a.m.

Wholeness in the world

Begins setting myself to rights

Tugging down my shirt

Polishing old shoes with miles of soul

Searching for the heights of spirit

Falling short, then falling in

The flow catches me,

Asks if I’m ready,

Tosses me towards heaven

Telling me to fly it on my own

In a whisper, constant & sure

The Holy Spirit of effort

Builds ladders to the stars

While I stand aground, looking up.

Knowledge smiles upon me

Wisdom takes me by the hand

Aligns me to Spirit

Over & over again

Never losing patience or

Succumbing to anger’s frustration.

Build for me a heaven, Lord

Just for me? You promised

A Holy Land at the end!

Where I become my own nourishment

Healthy & wholly

In service to God.

Mother Nature brooms the landscape

Shaping with wind so generous to share the dust

On my heels back to earth.

While lifting me into Love.

MY PRAYER AT 1:30 P.M.

Never to have the same moment

To be bored or tired of life

But accepting change

As its axis

While I spin in its regard,

The Father’s child, the mother’s girl,

Gathered up in arms to rest my head

(My heavy head)

Upon your shoulder.

My heart to yours, beating in holy synchrony

Inspired with breath, with mirroring You

With shining eyes & windblown hair

A kid You can be proud of

“Watch me, Lord!

I am doing this all for You.

May 22, 2022 0

Amity or On Opening My Heart

The Heart seeks amity in all. Heart understands Discord, comprehends Pretense. In the end, however, Heart desires amity in the practice of Doing No Harm.

When Heart energy is attacked by an event, by physical/emotional shock or trauma, the chi in the body sinks. News hits: We sink to our knees. It is harder to raise energy to prior levels. Some damage occurs which time may or not resolve (re-solve.)

Heart workarounds function long-term but no longer last through lifetimes. As our collective vibration rises, as Source makes Itself known to us, we rise to meet It, hopeful & eager.

We reveal & suffer Revelation in return.

When I observe my conversation, I find too many flawed clichés. Since the “lot of mankind” seems to be bipartisan struggle, the effort must be conscious to climb above this into … you guessed it … Forgiveness. Ours is a ladderlike ascension to our best selves, led enthusiastically by Higher Self. There are future me’s awaiting my arrival, allowing my spiritual immaturity space to grow, always listening for that deep beautiful breath of awakening, that inspiration, to signal a closer harmony with All-That-Is. They hold the door open, or at least prop it with a rock. We, like feral cats meowing at the door for sustenance, may one day enter Paradise by virtue of a single step.

I am told to move on in my life. I hear “Walk on, Carol” when I stop to check some exciting new activity which doesn’t serve my ascension by direct approach to Home. Maybe you hear these sweet, compelling voices as well? I’m simply one who passes the message.

By now, we’ve all heard the Heart has brain cells within. It’s not far out admission to extrapolate this to each organ in turn. After all, how many times have you relied on your gut brain over time?

Overtime. We’re in Spiritual Overtime. We play out scenes causing our energy to sink, our Hearts to hurt or be hurtful to others. When do you think this will end? I contend it will be gradual as we learn to hear what Heart thinks about it all. I know my Heart has a reality where thriving is all that matters along with how to continue bursting with Life!

I learn I must speak to my Heart each day & listen for reply. Often my Heart answers more quickly than my brain processes.

I know if I let my energy dip to liver, anger emerges. I allowed one such interaction recently & have listened to Heart going over it many times since.

My only resolution (re-solution) is scrambling into my Heart as fast as I can. Therefore I keep my own doors open, with gratitude for those I’ve been able to close.

Does this make me a better person? In a word: yes.

September 6, 2021 1

Goddess Return

THE WORLD HERSELF MUST CHANGE

If we feminize her, then I ask you to your face:

Have you ever known a woman awakening

To whom she has become

To torn & dirty clothing,

To civilizations

Wanting only

Enough

And cleanly lives.

Her breath can’t quite sync the change.

She’s wakened to our best & so much less unless you

Suborn destruction

We live so intensely watching chimera

Aborted promises –

Gutted for greed

But she’s awake.

It’s time to let go of the drama

To forge ahead on upcoming realities

So shave your head in rebirth

Feel the changes the Light will make

On your scalp.

Let the wind & wynd of your language

Move you to indwell

A willing heart.

Set down everything of who you have been,

If you wish to be anything else.

—

her hands smelled of Gardenias

from the oils added to the diffuser

bees danced outside her door.

—

The hand on my low back guiding me

So long has passed midway

Settled atop my spine

Watching over my shoulders

In excitement when I venture out

But the me who’s not That Me

Is inert, buried in a book,

A dream, as sublimation of life

Happening to itself elsewhere.

I miss ritual, the drums, the sage burning, the comradely changes of women meeting one month apart, coming from Church by way of the kitchen, let us eat before we drum.

And so we cleared away, choosing drums or uncovering them, forming an in & out circle with Grandmother in the center. We started her heartbeat, accosting all the grandmothers to reach for rattles, to join our rhythm.

We drummed away sadness while we welcomed its allowance; we drummed the sun across the sky, we broke & formed & ate again.

—–

I’ve

I’m

To whom this moment belongs:

Of whom life examples all

Unique to each

We dance

A skein of heartfelt beauty

Unabashed existence.

I have had that discussion

Un-numbered times

In languages I no longer speak

Won’t you set me free this moment?

When tears mist my eyes, hurting-salt

From glimpsing the rainbows just outside?

I don’t expect you to fall upon me weeping

When my eulogy is read

Unless I am the one reading it.

I am a Libra

All I can do is come into balance.

Once there,

I am free.

April 25, 2021 0

Minyan

We’re lucky to realize & recognize the reality now presenting itself for inspection. It is being made to look uninviting but inevitable.

The reality is that we are already past that doorway – what seems like such a transition is actually being done from 20-20 Hindsight.

For me to renew, or perhaps obtain, compassion & empathy with no attachments, I am here, now & naked. I feel like I’m moving forward but who can say for sure unless I say it first?

For some while the physical trauma of what I experienced has been assimilating within; I keep an eye on it. Ideas help it to reform me after infiltration. Pain & sheer goldurn inconvenience inform me now.

To find uniqueness in the matrix of how souls have overlapped each other (they were not keeping an eye on things) is to live in “threads” & “sound bites” – we live in underscores, not the fullest expression of life, but our version, so it is in us, embodied, We get snippets of stories where we get anything we’re not our own selves making up at this point. The individual took over the collective by a long shot…yet because it is defined by that, it still participates, telling itself it is individual.

This part ongoing now, this tsunami of undirected energy, is the part in the Biblical story where God says, “Go find Me ten good men.” We are looking carefully at what is ours to work with. But we have only ourselves to work upon, long-run. Was God saying Find me a Minyan; then we may pray? I can sure see that. At that time, & likely just in that location, there were too few able to pray in at the power to change the world; so that world as it was had to go. It was rendered, parsed up, mythologized with real bad weather & the knowledge of hard times ahead. It was given a name that would become a mark against mankind (“mainkind”). A skull & crossbones of a warning name.

Few roads are entirely straight. We seem to have meandered back there somehow. But we would find ten good persons within ten feet, did we have to seek today. The Universe seeks to extrapolate information from us; it is insatiable. What am I telling it? I seem to be getting a broader range of information incoming, but it is not on an intellectual level exclusively any more.

I need to keep an eye on my Prayer Quotient. I’m fairly sure it is ticking upward, so this is ideal. So, right now, all I can do is light it up for me. It’s up to others to seek their “what comes next.”

Remember, these are just writing exercises I have here. This is me, practicing scales. If you’re here, you’re tuning up a bit by touching another psyche. We said in Unity no candle ever lost by lighting another.

My life improves in a step by step pattern. It is a newer dance designed about allowing more fragility. That which was broken has healed with new memory. Somehow, I now have my Minyan. Step by step allows the impertinence of the step just before to pass unnoticed. It is interesting to watch the pace of others from the places where, like any good Trailblazer, I’ve stopped to look back.

November 15, 2020 0

Returning to Prayer

So, a time or two ago, I was able to tune into prayer as being that tiny generating engine behind my energy. While I’ve been making my changes, it turns out so has Prayer. What I was told was a technology has become solid as such.

I’ve learned “What were you thinking?” is not a rhetorical question. With the thought police increasing every day, it can now be an accusation. But I feel a potential sifting through: Alchemically, a potentiation sifting through, taking root around me, binding me down while nourishing my wings.

I see a “Next Level” sign blinking overhead.

I see big flakes of me, psychic flakes, pulled off & scampering down the sidewalks of other places, more geographic places.

Every once in awhile, I think I am pedaling backwards; slack; no traction. Then I just arrive, because Spirit has already done all the arranging while I was sightseeing. On tour may mean “On To Our” or “onto our”.

The wind that pushed us steadily forward has turned into a gusty go at us, sidling in or full-frontal. We emerge again & again. We arrive at our truest selves repeatedly or our repeated selves more truly. Even (& perhaps most accurately), we get to the ones who started out compliant, but are now rattling the chains back at the gang. The closer we get to ourselves in the Silence draped upon us, the more Powerful we become.

Compliant to Complaint is moving one single letter.

November 14, 2020 0

There Is No There There

Endings slip by like mileposts. Am I closer to my goals? Am I closing in on my divinity? This morning I tuned in to Joe Dispenza who says when the heart moves front & center, when the fear paradigm is extinguished, joy manifests throughout the body & brain.

Got it, thanks!

Adding another injury – as if one weren’t enough – I missed a stairstep recently & slammed backwards onto the doorframe, gashing my head. Two people were here: one an acupuncturist who threw a clean dishtowel at me after putting some ice into it & dashed for her car (sight of blood?); the other stood still & wailed aloud until I demanded she shut up now. Then both disappeared, leaving me bloody, frightened, wondering if anything else could happen. I called my good friend who came to nurse me yet again. She cleaned the wound, iced up the towel & everything went very quiet for awhile after she left.

I’ve no conscious idea what is happening here. But within an hour, I felt a joy come over me that I’ve felt before. I call it my “ineffable joy” aligning with head/heart to calm, succor & ratchet me upwards one more gear.

It’s been about six weeks since I broke my right arm. I pushed through the pain with Advil (me! who hasn’t swallowed a pill in more years than I can remember!) I literally found my feet amidst an outpouring of loving/kindness & support from friends who helped with cooking, emptying trash, making the bed, bringing books to read. The gratitude is bigger than I can ever tell you about: I can only share it. I can only promise to be mindful to offer this to more.

Heart coherence is an enviable state, except the envy would dislodge it.

Within a week, I’ve sold my massage gear, watching with no interest as my table was carried off, the supplies around this 24-year career disappearing into the truck bed & a check went into the box to deposit next week. I look inside, finding NO emotion around this event at all. I will either make it work without a career, or I will not. I’ve put my hand in God’s & said, “OK, let’s go.” I am shaken loose, poured out, running over.

I trust that all is well in my world. I trust I will keep my balance as confidence returns physically. I know that if I do not, someone will be there to help me straighten up. My body is battered & sore, my head scabbed over, my arm increasing movement by the hour. I have no earthly idea where this comes from; therefore it must be heaven-sent.

I have a feeling now that everything else is out of the way, my true work can begin. But this remains a wispy thought for the moment. With all the world moving around in varying directions, I can only watch from my personal catbird seat. Watch, and know it’s all changed out each blink. I can only get ready, stay ready, be ready.

Mother/Father/God: I thank you for all in my life. I offer my sore hands for your blessing, for you to place upon my real work. I do not bow my head because I know you want me watching the horizon for any opportunity to serve again. Allow me just a little more grace until I can earn all that is needed to return to you with interest. My healing is your manifestation of love for me. My friends are even more so. My blessing is a mirror of all you are & I must bring this through as powerfully as I can. I am emptying myself that you may fill me. I will be here when you call. It is I, Lord, a single soul of unique making; I speak for you, I flow you, I manifest your earthly work through just being. I am staying tuned to your words & wishes with the skin of my soul. I know your plans for me include all good, only love, active blessing to receive & offer to others. Show me your way; I’m tying my sneakers on, I am ready for you to enter my life more fully. I think most everything else is out of the way & I am clear to report to my future. Unburden me more, that I may walk with you lightly. The world gathers itself up behind me, already lost to it as you lead me home.

September 26, 2020 1

Montana Mind

***However, this is the Gila Wilderness in one teensey spot.***

Dear God,

Help me remember it all – the strife, the conflict we so no longer need. I think we’ve established that, yeh?

Let it fade to a shudder of bewilderment, almost amusement, at the future festivals to Remember Old History – or the 5D rendition of it. Let it never be re-enacted.

Show me how to open my mind/heart to all I experience today. move me into laughter & joy & help me set Anchor there. both

Help me better understand I am somehow She Who Once Was, with She Who Is now in charge. I accept both with Libran equanimity (tho I mostly ally with the latter.)

Thank You,

Love,

Carol

June 10, 2019 1

The world is changing rapidly now. Even as the birds awaken Nature, I stretch into the potential of accomplishing all the worldly tasks to which I conspicuously bring my energetic potential. My friends are out there somewhere: some traveling or readying to travel; some laboring with the monotony of dull routine; some flipping anxiously through the Tarot deck of possibility. Me? I’m getting two new tires this morning, helping a good-hearted man organize his new phone system, recycling another’s cast-off computer, buying groceries in anticipation of a visitor returning to her home state. The list would be dull for you to read, but for me it is the tithe I pay in this 24-hour cycle allotted to the limit of its hours.

In background to my little life is a panoply of desire, hunger, satisfaction, blessing, growing…

I have been a traveler. I have reorganized my life to face each direction on the compass. I have tarried in sunlight, searched for meanings, permitted myself pleasures & I laughed with glee at the chance to stir the pots once again, picking & choosing the tenderest bits to enjoy.

The morning is chilly; a countering point to the summer of approaching days of which more than a few will reach triple digit temps. I am happy to be once more in woolly pajamas before clothing becomes a choice of the lightest fabrics & the least covering available. I am happy I left a couple of items out of the winter-put-away to see me through a New Mexico Spring which liberally mixes cool & hot – a sundae of many colors & flavors…strawberries & salad, stew & bread…a diet of days which leave me replete within these few hours as I adjust to all incoming stimulation.

Does this sound a bit patronizing? Impossible? Routine? It does not to me, but I claim this day for the impossibility of being my best self in it & the inevitability of tomorrow’s lists already looming on a clear white page.

Bring me into the mix of life with fervor & forgiveness, with practicality & purpose, with benefit & blessing. I live in a net of many strands. Some are ones I use to climb into completion while others I weave into the needs of others to alleviate & remedy.

I am already choosing the flowers which will provide the bouquet of experiences. I feel ready for challenges & chuckles at the acceleration of light bringing me forward. How lucky can I be to live the life I desire & had no idea how to accomplish – except it’s here, now.

Lords of light & air, friends of home & heart, benefits of health & realization surround me. Ladies of fulfillment, fruition, friendship to offer & enjoy put hands into mine & this May day becomes a pearl I nourish deeply inside.

There is nothing left but to love the each & every: music, food, breath, color, flavor, exchange. I’m diving into it whole-heartedly, lists in hand. It doesn’t get better than this. Good fortune is all ’round me & I intend to appropriate it with accomplishment, endeavor, search & reward.

How about you?

May 9, 2019 0

HOW BLESSED WE ARE

HOW BLESSED WE ARE…

“With too much to eat,” as my dear friend says.

With tryptophan dreams, friends to loudly greet & gently hug, with cheeks to buss, hands to clasp, making a human wreath around a laden table.

How much fortune is ours when love rolls in & out like the tides of change, depositing gifts in shining merriment, or withdrawing everything near & dear with voracious tongues of flame?

How fulfilled our promises kept, to be where we are with those who accept us as we are in this living moment.

Bless us before the food grows cold, these dishes prepared in loving anticipation of sharing. We gather to bask in the anticipation of joy, little & large blessings of friendship & regard. We laugh, even as we are moved by the plight of those with so much less or nothing at all. We who are healthy, whole, in warm spaces with beloved possessions, still reach to those unable to reclaim these. We pray & we promise our prayers.

The whys will not wait, but we will be present today. In the dream of what we do have, in our gratitude, our love for the energy to help others rise from ashes. We love our children & bless our circumstances. We pray back the holy tides of abundance for all as we submerge in Grace.

November 22, 2018 2

Category: Prayers