Be close to me.

This was a song, the instrument of my being is played. Please, dear God, be close to me.

Never really knowing if that was happening. How would I? What does that mean? How would it feel? Be close to me.

Let me feel you here. I asked. I asked so many times, tumbling from my lips as easy as breath I begged you.

And so stuck on begging I felt alone. All I knew was some idea of a space I was asking you to fill.

Did you not want to be close to me? Did you not want to tumble into the space in my mind I had made for you?

And with resignation my lips could quiet. Space, the ache of the absence, my prayers stride up silence.

And then I have always been close to you. You said, or maybe it was me that said that. I'm confused whose voice was that.

Have you been there here all along? Did I miss you all along?

Was it you within me that cried out asking for us to be together to be in a kind of loving dance?

I'm letting my mind wake up to the knowingness that the dance has been happening all along. And perhaps like an echo of something of yours woven into me, a cry from within myself, responding to myself.

Was it you who would me into silence? I thought that was my doubt and my grief, my awareness of my loneliness. Maybe it was you who shut me up.

You stopped the incestant groveling from something. I wanted to see something I already had here. You were here.

I only want to stay quiet forever to go to the places you have always been and discover them, trace the interior spaces of your dwelling.

To know the million miles of unexplored territory that you have invited me into and even in this moment, like a mother growing a child, sharing a body.

Like a son looking into the mirror and seeing the face of his father, like lovers inside of each other, like breath in my lungs, you are and have always been self-imposed to me.

It's hard to talk about prayer in a deconstructed state.

It's one of the most frequent things people ask me about is prayer because so many people grew up with some kind of a personal conception of the divine.

And then that starts to unravel and then they don't know what to do with prayer, not to mention how many people, even in some kind of traditional or devout spiritual practice, already have trouble with the practice of an anyway speaking to God.

You can feel awkward, you can feel alienating. And I've noticed people can be almost like prayer invious because I hear other people describe their experiences with prayer.

And they're like, well, why doesn't it happen to me? And sometimes people will speak kind of metaphorically or narratively about something that was almost unspeakable.

So they prayed and they had some kind of emotional response. And so they'll use language like and God told me because they're not being deceptive. It's the best language they have that fits within the tradition that they abide in.

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