December 5, 2025
Prayer is my mind racing to try and solve the various work on my plate: write the stubborn paragraph, cook the meal I’m responsible for next Monday, hash out an agenda. But the paragraph is comprised of thin wisps of words which float away as soon as I’ve thought them, however brilliant they shimmered for a moment in my mind. The meal remains illusory, the agenda wavers and melts.
None of this, I know well as I remain seated in effortful silence, is prayer, it is prayer’s opposite, the grasping of all that concerns me ever more tightly, yearning for control and resolution. What is most prayer-like is to notice this is happening, over and over, the entire time I sit there, and stay seated, full of an intention I cannot realize. To say to God, I think—or at least to myself, assuming God has the privilege of eavesdropping—I do not wish for it to be this way, yet I cannot seem to be another way. Help? Do I even phrase that word or does it remain implied? When I revert to problem-solving mode my mind races, literally hyping my breathing as if I were physically chasing after the thoughts that dart about in my mind. I try a breath prayer: Lord you are good (in) and your mercy endures (out) forev . . . (in) er (out). It slows me.
Do I meet God? Perhaps more accurately I slow down enough to remember God has been here this whole time, chuckling at my feverish attempt to gather and obtain as mine that is already here, like proudly holding up a tiny pile of pebbles to proclaim a victory toward earth-building while sitting atop a mountain.
I’ve been distracted like a child by the promise of the winter’s first foray into snow. It’s not even snow the weather app promises, but sleet, known in my previous home of New York as wintry mix, name more romantic than the slushy reality. When I awake at 5:30 there’s nothing. But by the time I finish whatever prayer all that was, punctuated by a few raising of my head toward the dark, unmoving horizon, whose secrets remain locked within impenetrable blackness, and then, a few peeks at an app, as if the screen can better relay information about what’s outside my window than my own eyes, there’s a change. In the half hour that’s passed a thin white layer has descended on the opposite roofs, the neighbor’s deck. Not enough to cover the wind-blown leaf pile out back, curled up against all that tired old dirt we need to haul out to get a new fence in, but enough to disguise it, like powdered sugar over a cracked cake.
Predictably the thud of my son’s feet nears the room where I sit just as I open my laptop to start writing. I set it aside and let him climb on top of me, where he snuggles in with giddy joy at the sight of the floating white specks under the distant streetlight, the easiest way to see in all this darkness that we’re not imagining it. He wants to wake his sisters to drink in the joyful sight.
“Not til 7, please?” I ask him, inviting him to curl up with a book while I write.
“Nah,” he says, jetting out again to check out the first floor view.
I grab the laptop to begin again but my daughters’ internal radar, attuned while they sleep to atmospheric disturbances, has picked up on the exciting update, and their softer feet pad down the hall moments later. Once more I set it aside, opening up the blanket so one can climb in on each side of me, largely obscuring my view of my own windows.
“Is it a little morning?” the youngest asks hopefully, wanting badly to be permitted this special favor of remaining in my lap when it is not yet time to get up, when, as my kids well know, I am in my well-guarded mommy alone time. Sleep still rests on her pink cheeks, her small body radiating a cozy sweetness I cannot bear to turn away.
“It is,” I confess, surrendering to her weight on me.
“Yea!” she sings, elated, both of them wagging like puppies at the scene unveiling n the gray-ing sky, the white now visible in relief against the treeline and not only in the streetlight.
“Recess will be canceled,” one says.
“Will aftercare be canceled?” the other asks, wanting more time at home with mommy.
Usually I shudder at the thought, protective of my workday, my solitude. But something frees me now to see this first snow day of my youngest daughter’s fifth year, when she still—barely—retains the snuggles and softness of her baby self, as a precious gift to receive, not a burden to solve for. Even seeing it this way at all is a gift, not a transformation I achieve through discipline, right thoughts, good vibes. I think of one of the earliest pieces I wrote on the blog, a January snow covering all my garden failures, the way I felt that snow as a gift—an unearned clean slate, not the slog toward perfection I’ve felt compelled to try for (and feel I’ve always failed at) for my whole life.
There’s nothing harder, sing my favorite band Over the Rhine, than learning how to receive. Every day I look at a piece of art I made with these words, a memorial to my sabbatical. Still true, a year and a half later. But what is also true is I desire to keep learning, and more often swell with gratitude than the stubborn insistence I make prayer work because I finally crack the code of mystical attention. And maybe all of this, smothered in children flush with delight, submitting to interruptions, staying put and desiring what I can’t do for myself, this is all prayer, all morning long.
