To you, first stillness, first vibration, contour and current of dawn, matrix of naming, to you who flows through every geometry, you infinite echo, infinite change, I pray

Here in my own renewal, now in my own beginning—

Let me open to the early world

Let me listen closely, sound as shape, texture as sound, sound as route, silence radiant

Let my ears be specific, my song specific—a peculiar music’s precision, its question and answer, voice revealed, this pulse to bridge a distance, this vessel to cross cartographies with lost ghosts

Let me surrender to small astonishments, beauty unspeakable

Let me attend to this body, care for this body changing with age, decay’s tender apprentice

In my nearness to light, threshold of light, submersion in light, grant me courage, and in nearness to terror, threshold of terror, submersion in terror, courage

Let me be a student of confoundment, trouble, mercy, a student of mystery

Let me bear a truth of the earth—vexing, luminous, brutal—this land, this water, this close-by, the endless Here

In agony, grant me the hallowed breath, in ferocity, blood river, the swift calm, in all conflict a channel for anguish, the holiness of touch, inevitable junctures of heat

In my tasks, which are soluble threads I weave into all our vastness, grant me the joyful insights of practice, which is wisdom beyond rigid rule and bland craft, relinquishment of strategy, rather, prayer, an approach to dreaming, wish, wildness—lead me toward the wonder of variation, groove, exalted design

In teaching, let me be an aperture for many electric vectors in the presence of others— who are also teachers, not divine power, but divine possibility, this soulful intention, a soulful attention, conduits to each other’s reason, augmentation of each other’s seeing, pulsars in each other’s ken. Not judgment but doxology

Thank you for every harbor and every sanctuary and may that gratitude be the light by which I glean some fluency in the harbor’s longing and map—specific harbor, specific longing, specific map My god, let me be present

Let me study time, not clocks so much as a respiration, a sky

Let my failures evolve, orient, shape, this blesséd tool for honing not success but intuition

Bless intuition. Bless thought. Bless loss. Bless the hundred forms of mourning. Bless work as it is mirrored in the sanctity of my rest. Bless rest. Bless the opposing journeys. Bless feeling. Bless the genius of laughter. Bless us unfinished, funky, and broken. Bless healing, however incomplete.

Bless the multiple unseen hungers that compose the very intricacy of my enemies’ and friends’ lives. Oh resplendent strangers, oh strange familiars, oh belovéd

Let my solitude be an energizing force of my intimacies

Let my intimacies be the energizing force of my imagination. Let my imagination flourish in the richness of solitude

Let me discern solitude from alienation, so as not to propagate the latter in anyone’s life, including my own

Let each departure and each return be not so much tethered as heavenly attuned to my love, my life, my dearest fire, my beacon, my drink, my richest spring, home of my waking hour, home of my night