Prayer

A teacher told me there are really only two prayers, "help me, help me, help me" , and "thank you, thank you, thank you".

I know those prayers. I say them often. Mostly together, both, not one or the other.

Sometimes I hold them pressed gently together between my hands, drawn to my heart. Soft hum of breath. I feel them echoing in me like ripples of waves, gentle wind. Steady but moving, shifting things in me. Tender but powerful.

Other times I grasp them in fists and launch them toward heaven. I stomp them into the earth. I howl and scream. Then they are like tempest gales, seismic waves.

But there are other prayers in me that live outside the bounds of language. I feel them in my bones, deep in the center of my heart and lungs, flowing in my veins, river of my spine. Prayers of embodiment, of nature and knowing. Ancient, wordless. They need no response. They are the answer.