The last few days have felt like bootcamp around here. Baby wakes at 4am, and then fights every naptime tooth and nail. I will say it hasn’t been hard to feel gentleness toward this creature who is cause for so little sleep (including his own). He doesn’t know how to sit down yet, and is programmed to be only virtical now that he has the skill to get that way, so the dear just stands there, exhausted, crying. Lie him back down, and up he goes again, ad infinitum.

Last night as I lay exhausted in bed (I won’t even tell you how early it was), I wanted to pray. I wanted to ask for a blessing on all of us–of peace, of deep rest. Of bars of a crib that won’t beckon Pied Piper-like at 4am. I wanted to ask for help with my writing, too, and knowing how to talk and think about who I am and all the other things bouncing around my brain.

I tried, but the words wouldn’t come. I’m in an awkward stage with the All, if that’s what I might call God. Awkward in the sense that, well, to whom am I praying when I pray? Something that hears me? Something that has feelings about me? Or is it to myself? I believe that each of us has more resources, more depths of wisdom inside ourselves than we can ever know, but even knowing that is little consolation in the face of feeling helpless or small. In the face of sleep deprivation and hopes and dreams that sometimes feel way out of reach. Is it me to whom I pray?

Or is it something much bigger, something like The Universe, and are my thoughts percieved by this All, then, like that butterfly line, and somehow incorporated into the ongoing flow of creation, maybe even in such a way that what is created after that prayer is somehow different than if it weren’t prayed? I like that way of thinking of it.

All in all, sometimes it feels much easier, maybe even despite all the suffering everywhere that has such unsettling implications on its own, to pray to a personal consciousness, a person sort of God, that’s somehow distinct from everything. At least that would feel a little more possible lying in bed at night, at the end of a full day of mothering, when I’d really like to be mothered myself. When I’d like to be listened and tended lovingly to.

Maybe blogging is a kind of prayer, and all your ears are the real and personal, embodied hearing of God.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 11:31 am and is filed under Motherhood, Psychology, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.