pacing while praying
LJ Idol season 8 week 1 prompt: When you pray, move your feet.
Dancing was divine long before any deity answered my prayers. So I kept dancing, kept praying, even when nobody seemed to be listening. Then I found not just one, but a whole group of goddesses who wanted to listen. Or maybe they found me. I was thirteen and I'd been dancing since I had the motor control to do so. That's a whole lot of faith that kept me going for a decade without an answer.
The Oxford dictionary tells me that prayer is "a solemn request for help", based on the Latin precarius which means "obtained by entreaty". I don't know how to pray like that. Prayer is not a solemn act for me; it's about movement and light behind my closed eyes and sitting quietly as a precursor to wild motion. My goddesses expect me to dance my worship (I'm Pagan, a solitary eclectic witch if you want to get specific). I don't pray sitting still; I have to move. I have to be active when in the presence of things in which I see the divine, which in my case is everything. Witches often find divinity in everything, in everyone, because (as the song goes)
we all come from the goddess
and to her we shall return
like a drop of rain
flowing to the ocean
(from Phyllis Curott's Book of Shadows)
Prayers, like spells, are active things. You can't just say "yo goddess, chuck a new car and a hot lover my way, kthnxbai" and expect it to happen. You have to give thanks, you have to pray, you have to do everything in your power to open yourself up to the possibility of the thing(s) you are requesting. You have to move yourself into praying, into being. Nobody's going to do it for you.
Dancing was divine long before any deity answered my prayers. So I kept dancing, kept praying, even when nobody seemed to be listening. Then I found not just one, but a whole group of goddesses who wanted to listen. Or maybe they found me. I was thirteen and I'd been dancing since I had the motor control to do so. That's a whole lot of faith that kept me going for a decade without an answer.
The Oxford dictionary tells me that prayer is "a solemn request for help", based on the Latin precarius which means "obtained by entreaty". I don't know how to pray like that. Prayer is not a solemn act for me; it's about movement and light behind my closed eyes and sitting quietly as a precursor to wild motion. My goddesses expect me to dance my worship (I'm Pagan, a solitary eclectic witch if you want to get specific). I don't pray sitting still; I have to move. I have to be active when in the presence of things in which I see the divine, which in my case is everything. Witches often find divinity in everything, in everyone, because (as the song goes)
we all come from the goddess
and to her we shall return
like a drop of rain
flowing to the ocean
(from Phyllis Curott's Book of Shadows)
Prayers, like spells, are active things. You can't just say "yo goddess, chuck a new car and a hot lover my way, kthnxbai" and expect it to happen. You have to give thanks, you have to pray, you have to do everything in your power to open yourself up to the possibility of the thing(s) you are requesting. You have to move yourself into praying, into being. Nobody's going to do it for you.