A prayer for presence
Dear Presence,
I yearn to meet you here: in this exact moment of the here and now. I want—I hope to be capable of accepting this: the certain safety of this moment, to cup and hold this moment alone. To let fall away all that is not right now. To wrap my palms around the expansive horizon contained in the here that is simultaneously brief, small and endlessly grand, unendingly open.
So much within me and outside of me seeks to steal me away from you. So much assays to alienate. Uncertainty crawls into the ear and nags. Scarcity spins its lies, on the hunt to distort my perception of you. Fears creep in and look to tear me away, to divide me from the wisdom and rooted knowing that is located solely in your ever unfurling. So much attacks my connection to faith—this, the commitment that allows me to meet you, that allows me to open to others, that allows me to nestle into the cradle of trust, that grants me the courage to step up and out and into the present. I want to be full in you, fully in my body, wildly open to others, here breathing in the fragrance of smell, of sight, of touch, of sound—here with the colors, the textures, with the feelings both sensate and abstract.
I pray to arrest any attempt that would press the falsehood that anything exists—or can be created—outside of you. You, the present, is truly all there is. Here, directly in front of me is the wealth of what is mine to look at, to sit with, to respond to. There is nothing else. Anything else is an illusory mirage or a spectral phantom, reminders of what I have outgrown, reminders of what I cannot possibly anticipate.
I pray to lay rest the parts of me that cultivate and feed on fear, the parts that are too lonely, too insecure to leap wide into the always available connectedness. I pray to reconnect with myself, with who I am now. I pray to be able to connect with those who are here beside me. I pray to step into the bounty of the process of existing and the freedom of never being settled.
Dear Presence, I pray, help me to come home.