I Haven't Been Able To See

When I'm this exhausted.
I sit down at my desk.
Close my eyes.
And pick a book.
{Any book.}
I open it randomly.
And read the first thing I see.

It's my little prayer for divine intervention.  For help.  A spark.  A glimmer.  Anything that could point me in the right direction.  Give me the answer that I need.

But I've read all those books.
Some even two times or three.
So there's not any secrets that I haven't already seen.

When I'm sitting in the hospital room
{For the second time that week.}
I take out my journal
And I write:
Dear God, please grant me strength, wisdom, love, and clarity.  Thank you.
Dear God, please grant me strength, wisdom, love, and clarity.  Thank you.
Dear God, please grant me strength, wisdom, love, and clarity.  Thank you.
Dear God, please grant me strength, wisdom, love, and clarity.  Thank you.
Dear God, please grant me strength, wisdom, love, and clarity.  Thank you.

I write it over and over.
No thought to penmanship, but mindful about punctuation.
I write it like an affirmation
Or some law of attraction silliness.

I write it like it's the combination to a winning lottery ticket.

There's something addictive about repetition.
Something very comforting about the daily mundane.

I can measure my dependence to it
On a scale from one to ten.

Yes, I'm talking about the ducks and the hummingbirds.
Yes, the white cranes, the herons.
Yes, the trees that are all twisted and tied.
And yes, the clouds that are most communal right after sunrise.

I've grown attached to their presence in my life
Ever since I was a little girl
Talking to the deer--
Sitting in the river--
Following raccoons.

But what about now?
What good does any of this do?

The books, the trainings, the yoga classes, the meditation, the spiritual hee-haw, even the paintbrush.

Who cares how I feel, what the Universe has to say, if God is a he, a she, an ant or a tree.

What use is the animals, the birds, the mantras, the deeper knowing.

If I'm sitting in the corner of a hospital room,
you're lying in a mechanical bed,
and I can't get Phoenix's face out of my mind as our friends drove away with him?

What about this?  What about right now?

What magical bullshit does life have hidden away
For me to process
and chew
and swish around like brandy.
Then share so cleverly written in a 500 word blog post.

The truth is that I've been spending so much time looking,
that I haven't been able to see.

The patterns.
The truth.
The cries. And the whaling.
The yearning. The yearning. The yearning.

For healing. For love. For attention.

For me.

I'm letting it all go now.
I give it my blessing
To fall away and burn to smithereens.

To let the walls crack.
To allow the floods to come rushing in.
To forget everything I ever knew about spirituality,
about healing,
about what will get us through.

I surrender.  I surrender.  I surrender.

Dear God, Dear Goddess, Dear Lord, Dear Universe, Dear Creative Source, Dear Buddha.
I give it all to you.