How do you pray?

The leaves have opened completely outside my window, and my neighbor’s honeysuckle bush expands over my deck, a little more each year, though he leans over his deck and apologizes and trims it. The first summer we lived here I think I saw a hummingbird come drink from one of the small white flowers, and I have been watching from my office window in case the miracle repeats itself.

Perhaps this is prayer: waiting for something you don’t really expect to happen.

This morning I stepped out and the neighbors fuchsia azaleas were flowering and the pale cherry blossom petals fallen from the tree were carpeting the walkway and the blossoms above were still holding on and I was inside the pink, holding a trash bag, filled with birds of paradise gone brittle. Prayer.

And her face in the rising light of the morning, the sharp of her cheekbone, the flat plane on mornings I wake without her: prayer, prayer, prayer.

It is the last Friday in Ramadan and I haven’t fasted a single day in nearly 30 years. I read when I was twelve that a person fasting without prayer is no different than a starving dog. I’m no starving dog, I thought when I quit praying. All or nothing was the way it was taught and I couldn’t give all, so I switched to nothing. I wanted more tradition and promise and ritual than Islam offered. I wanted incense. I wanted someone to lay a garland on. I wanted a bare midriff, an elongated braid. I wanted fire and ceremony, song and clay, signs of an other world. Belonging, but make it transcendent.

The poem we read this week was “The Other Love” by Henri Cole, which is behind a paywall at The Paris Review (a subscription I highly recommend). But responding to the question, “How Do You Pray?” might be enough. Set a timer: 12 minutes on the topic. Anything can be prayer, you just have to decide it is.

https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/7862/the-other-love-henri-cole