Wordless Prayers

Unarticulated means uttered without the use of normal words or syllables. I can't tell you how many times I've wished that the invocations and spoken prayers that come out of my mouth could have been captured all these years. If only the windshields of my cars were conscious witnesses; if only the rocks on the mountain paths I walk could record my voice; if only only my pillows had hard drives and the transcription programs from our near future...

I would be effortlessly prolific; I might even have been a Poet.

But the magic of divine dialoguing is impermanent. The minute I introduce the technology or the awareness of capture or preservation, the unselfconscious zone of free styling or free versing, channeling, speaking in flow doesn't happen. It doesn't have to. The power of the present is an energy -- actually, an energetic thought charged with emotion.

Even if you don't identify with being a writer, you have experienced this magic in conversation. If you're a musician, even better, you know the synergy of jazz and jam. If you are clairaudient, it's likely not the words that you read or the sounds you hear that speak to you, but the emotional core between, behind, within the translation.

Seth called me the other morning to tell me about the transformation that has occurred in his relationship with Spirit as a result of reintroducing the conversational element; he said he has been missing that dialog. Curiously, I'd just written the three paragraphs above, and our chat found us crossing paths, passing with a wave and a hello in opposite directions.

I've become increasingly aware that the more open I become, the more deeply reverent I try to be, the words evaporate. Now, I'm not talking about asking my spirit guides questions to retrieve specific information, or relaying the conversations I hear occurring between my clients' Higher Selves and their guardians, or writing with the intention of being read -- divine dialoging and automatic writing techniques are meant to package our communication with spirit in language. I feel it must be a rare moment for any of us that we do not think in words. Thoughts are things; words are the handles, the magic incantations that call our manifestation genies out of the lightworker lamps of our hearts and minds.

Hawaiian Mini Memoir #1 During one of the many readings I received from the other Angel Therapy Practitioners® who attended Doreen Virtue's workshop in Kona, I was told that one of my spirit guides -- the one who assists my ability to manifest -- presents as an enormous purple-blue genie.

(Kim was that your reading? Let me know so I can credit you properly.)

I love that image! Is a big genie not the most wickedly, deliciously perfect way to personify your power to manifest?

The De-evolution of My Morning Prayer For many years, I've engaged in elaborate invocations of the Mother Goddess -- my own original chants and songs and wordy beseeching hellos. But many months ago it began to change, and I've only recently become consciously aware of how and possibly why.

An elderly male cat whom I call my Buddy divorced the family two doors down and moved up the street to spend his retirement years with me. His human mother had a baby, and then they got a dog, and Buddy's home territory was reduced to a garage prison. He wasn't having it. You have to respect a cat's love and relationship because it must be earned and maintained. My garage combines a cushy warm cast-off armchair with the independent freedom of a pet door.

Cats (as well as dogs) are highly sensitive to psychic energies. I have observed that my feline familiars are particularly drawn to sex and prayer. Very early in our friendship, Buddy began to approach me during my morning invocations and demand to be included. I would pet him and speak my invocations to the Mother out loud as opposed to silently, as if he required the vocalization to participate. I prefer purring to church choirs and pipe organs. If I could purr, I would have no need for any other form of prayer or healing meditation.

My morning ritual evolved -- it became simplified -- to the joy of my hand chakras harmonizing with Buddy's purr, as we face the dawn. All those decorous words distilled into a brief shared statement -- gratitude to the Mother for giving us another day.

Now, it is just the emotion and the thought behind that gratitude, with the squinty-eyed cat smile that accompanies our shared vibration.

Walking Meditation All the years I called it pacing, and disparaged my movements as some expression of mania. Someone recently asked me if I might consider doing readings via video chat. An excellent idea, if it weren't for the fact that I tend to run around outside like a squirrel while I channel information for you. Even my live teleclasses are coming to you via mobile phone as I walk up and down and all around the creek at the back of my yard. :-)

Again, a fellow Angel Therapist® did a reading for me recently in which she referred to my walking meditations. Oh, wow -- is that what I'm doing? Don't you love it when someone objectively reframes your areas of negative self-perception in such a way that you can shift to empowered intention without changing anything but your perspective?

Stones, Henges, and Sigils I've instinctively arranged stone circles in the woods since I was child. My drip sand castles were not Disney medieval but cathedrals in the style of Anton Gaudi (although I didn't realize it until art history classes when I got to college).

To this day, nothing feels like a more appropriate physical skeleton for my thought forms and prayers than an impromptu sculpture of natural materials. You too have sat in the grass in summer making daisy chain crowns or plucking petals to divine Heaven's plans for your pubescent romances. You too wrote messages in bottles and tried to send them out into the sea -- frustrated with the reality that the tide doesn't take them as easily as you imagined, but still. Maybe you buried treasures in suburban time capsules, so that you might be remembered by future civilizations. Or maybe you carved your presence into desktops in ballpoint pen? Left your chewing gum on an amusement park tree, like some colorful hasty equivalent to a wailing wall? Have you tied messages for recently deceased loved ones to helium balloons and released them into the sky?

Maybe you've just arranged leaves on the ground in an absent-minded moment of introspection.

Hawaiian Mini Memoir #2 There are miles and miles of black lava fields across Kona; as if Pele herself has poured an enormous asphalt parking lot beside the highway. Hundreds upon hundreds of people have left what at first appears to be spray-paint graffiti, but is actually white rock or coral arranged into words and designs upon the near infinite dark background of lava. Everything from memorials to names to pictures scroll by as you drive.

There were many times after particularly profound rituals that I found myself meta-pacing, out to the black cliffs of the resort overlooking the Pacific. I had a favorite spot that I returned to, every night and every morning. And though I witnessed others out there on those cliffs dancing with their iPods, bellowing affirmations at the waves that answer with a crash and jet of spray, bending in the slow motion of Tai chi, or silhouetted against the sea in lotus positions or yoga poses --

watching others, my own presence seemed noticeably un-theatrical or not-so-grand by comparison. In my deepest moments of needing to express gratitude, I could barely stand in that spot and choke out a Thank You before the emotion welled up behind it and obliterated all intentions of dressing a tsunami of feeling power up in words and orchid garland leis.

And, I realized, in one of those moments, that the words just aren't even necessary.

Before I left, I snapped a picture with my phone, of what Slade's impermanent testament actually looks like in physical form. It's not an illuminated manuscript, or even an inspired blog post.

My most powerful memorial to gratitude for that week of healing and learning is the evidence of my absent-minded hands at work on the ground as I let the wordless emotions simply come through me -- my single character monogram in white coral on black lava.