A Morning Prayer

[Guest guest]

[i know...two consecutive posts that have no obvious bearing on our

group. This is a kind of sequel to 'The River Before Me,' though,

and I found after I wrote it I could not bear for the one to be here

without the other. So I made myself a promise, which I will try to

keep: For every post like this, I will post half a dozen abstracts

that actually seem relevant. Damn! That'll teach me to wax poetic!

Already 12 abstracts in debt! Pub Med, here I come!]

A Morning Prayer

A morning prayer rises like mist from the dew.

I dreamed us as the two hands of a clock, and admired all the angles

we formed as we circled the day together.

I believe it is a true dream. Any two people form an angle like

that, which if you take its measure tells you something unique about

the moment in time they share.

I have so much time now, with this illness.

When I look at the clock, it is always 5:05 or 11:11, a moment in

the day when two hands come together, as in prayer, pointing in

exactly the same direction.

At dusk, when your work is done and you come home to me, I will

tell you my dreams.

I dreamed us as an old couple, who walk down to the river together

at dusk, and the river is not my life or your life, but life.

Where is life?

Here, now, within us, among us, at hand.

And what is at hand, here and now, within and among us? Life!

The hours of our days are numbered like Bible verses, so that we can

find them and read their story, whenever something reminds us of

them.

Sometimes I ask you what time it is, just for the pleasure of

hearing your voice call out the minute and the hour. I pretend I'm

flirting with a stranger. `Hey, do you have the time?'

Courses for beginners are numbered 101, which stands for that

privileged moment in life when we are together, at the very

beginning of a new, shared destiny.

We belong to a tribe of lifelong beginners, who never pass the

moment of 1:01 without sending up thanks to Life, for the chance to

begin again.

I woke this morning at 5:05, and felt that you too woke just then,

and for all the miles between us we were really both moving in the

same great house, turning lights on and making ready to greet the

dawn.

Like two hands of a clock, we never part for long. I move past you 6

hours, and though we are aligned I feel we are so far apart! But I

do not try to reverse my steps and run back to you. I take 6 more,

and we are together again, back in our beginning.

On every face that takes time's measure, one sees two hands in

motion. One sweeps through the hour, one sweeps through the day. If

you look very close, you see a third. How thin it is! Always on the

move, its seems, but that is a trick of perspective. Look closely

now, see how it pauses, stopping to savor every second of every hour

of every day. Thin? It's as slim as the prospect of heaven on earth,

but without its efforts life on earth would come to a halt, and

heaven would be bereft.

This is the hand of the spirit, that brushes us both as it passes,

and for that moment we know exactly who and what we are.

I dreamed the spirit was our child and our teacher, and you and I

thrilled to its voice as the three of us rested together, all in the

same moment, each sure of our place.

I love you.