Do you think we can change the course of life by moving things? Things like plants and people and prayers? Of course our bodies when they move change our lives directly, but when I place this intricate leaf with juniper and a broken piece of a seed pod together, perhaps they act by proxy as I imagine my hopes might tumble into my hands in reality — days, months, maybe even years after today. And in that moment my mind remembers how beautiful they looked on the snowy path when I bent down to grab them. Now they are together in my hand sitting next to a friend.
Ritual practice and prayer seems so oddly simple to me sometimes. The practice appears in so many different genres of moving things together and apart, different wants and needs and hopes and dreams, even practical things like money and food and machinery. The return is the opposite of simple though, so complex it is just beyond my understanding always. And these days, for me, the consequences are just a hurricane of guesses. My eyes only looking for things to move — Things that strike me as beautiful and kind.
The older I get, the more the wild return of ritual practice and prayers makes me smile in confused bliss. Really — it is like, how is this gathering of beauty, of hopes and dreams and pangs of pain — how is this going to turn out this time? My prayers and rituals unfold so much more slowly now, slowing down for a farm boy and a turtle I have only seen in dreams. My thoughts are disconnected from everything because, you know what? I’ve been wrong way, way too much.
My heart has been true. I do look for grace alone. But many, many things in many, many ways that I have said and done have been wrong — buried beneath too much conditioned thinking. And I am digging now.
Like I always have, I walk down paths with loved ones and alone, too. Letting wrong things return, humbling myself to their lessons. Gathering up and moving beautiful things towards innocent unknown ends. And at home I carve tigers from paper and make dogs from straw hoping to find everything I can let go of, trying my best to move and pray for what I love, while I take as much wrongness as I can from the winds of all these wild returning things that I do not understand.