All Around Us Is Prayer
Dear one, what happens if you let it all go?
Every single thing. The old dream that no longer wants your holding. The old love that no longer desires your expression. Who do you become, once your hands are empty? What becomes of your prayers, your petitions, for this experience of life?
I visited a beautiful installation on Governors Island within the AnkhLave Arts Alliance residency. In this house, artist Christina M. Tapper tells the history of hush harbors in a site-responsive installation. Tapper shared that hush harbors “...were secret gatherings of enslaved Black people in the U.S., typically in wooded areas and ravines where they met to worship, freedom dream, commune with ancestors, and grieve, away from the watchful eyes of enslavers.”
Within a 3.5-foot by 6.5-foot walk-in closet, Tapper invited patrons to pray into a cast iron pot, the most unassuming gateway for evocation. She shared that “Cast iron pots for cooking and iron wash pots were used for secret prayer in some hush harbor gatherings. Black folks would kneel down to whisper their prayers or sing a song into an overturned pot, which was propped up by a stick or a rock. It was believed that this setup muffled the sound of their calls to God, helping to maintain the secrecy of these meetings.”
By now, you can imagine I was holding back tears. So I knelt down.
Image of Christina M. Tapper's installation: We Are Each Other's Harbor
I whispered my prayers here. My yearnings. If time had allowed, I would have stayed, just melting into the wisdom of this simple, portal-opening technology. I wanted to remain in that moment. Weeping. Telling secrets. Rejoicing. Speaking life over myself and our world. Speaking enoughness over myself and our world.
This is what our practices are for, the songs, the spoken word, the writing, the movement. We speak into the depths, and in doing so we tell the watchful eyes of dominance: we will not be stopped, we shall not be moved. Each return to practice widens our reach. Each return enlivens the cycles that make and unmake us, the sense-making, the life-giving, the life-ending. With every practice, every act of presence, we leap into deeper potency. I believe we all carry such wisdom already, in our blood and bellies (our own access to the Way).
Look at the hands you till life with. Notice the fingertips still coated in the soaked earth of our daily prayers, our hopes for liberation. Notice the lump that lives in the back of your throat, the tightness that gathers within. With every petition we voice, we smooth that tightness the way water rounds a stone.
Leave no petition unsaid. No song unsung. Let every whisper, every response, every silence (every silencing) be met with this wisdom of life. Life spoken over. Life spoken through. Life spoken within. I wonder, what has it been like for you to sense the vitality of life beckoning through you? What is it whispering to you?
Dear one, I whisper you into the harbors that hold me, that hold us all, revealing what wisdom and what ways we need for this time, and for the times still coming.
For your inquiry:
What are the entities, the vessels, the determinants that have shaped your understanding of the vitality and necessity of your own life and being?
Look around you: this is the Way, and these are the altars of life. What do you need to whisper into? What do you need to sing into?
Take a moment to shake off the dust, to lift any veil covering the altar of your heart. What intuitive practice helps you do this?
I’m listening to what comes up for you.
Until we meet again <3
