Las Amazonas: Attempts at Prayers

Upriver on the Amazon.  Morning #1 on the trip to Yurimaguas.

I came up here at dawn—the top floor of our large boat—to pray.  Or meditate.  I struggle at 'los dos.'

Start to pray.

Overwhelmed by "Really?  You're listening?"

"Really? It matters?" 

How shall I crawl back to the foot of Your sweet presence not knowing if you're really there?  It seems to be beauty that pulls me away from You and beauty that pulls me toward You.  I read Eva Luna or experience a dinner or a symphony and ask "Why would I linger in cold prayer and brittle scripture when there is a lush world?"  But it is that song, that sunset, that novel, the praise of love-making, that cold fresh morning that proclaims and celebrates Your existence.  So I sit here, trying to join them.

I try to pray.  For K'd decision and lonliness.  For D's well being, and the words he makes that change us.  For Gs and C.  For D' broken heart. For precious J and for D.  For A and E.  For V and W. For Gs.  For U—as individuals and their brittle marriage.  For S and W and C and…T.  And.

Maybe it's more to take my heart off myself.

Or in search of something I swear I once knew how to do:

To pray, convinced.

Or in search of that sliver of life that is about more than me, in 24 hour days dominated by my tyrant happiness.  

Not everyone will change everything on a global scale.  So I look at my quaint perimeter: of people, of compost, of justice, of speaking the truth in tender love.  Lord, I don't know how to be a Christian "like I once was."  I don't know how to "buy it."  And why does it always seem like there's something being sold?   But I ask that you keep me in your hand, keep pulling me closer by whatever means and by the best means.

I feel like it's slipping away.  Not that I've found some intellectual block or invalidator or even suffered some personal crisis negating it all (though perhaps South America has been all those things), but like I'm falling out of love--the enamoration fading.   Someone "I will always love" nonetheless, at least in memories.   What I mean, my Beloved, is:  I'm not exactly sure where You are, nor how to get there.  And the road--be it silence or dancing, Christianity or Taoism--is not that essential to me.  I want to be where you are.  (If you are that close.)  Where your love permeates and invades and where perhaps I am capaz --to love you, to love others—as much as myself.  That fantasy world.

Open me up.  Cut out this heart of stone and replace it with one of flesh.

Las Amazonas: Jungle Wooing

Hard to know what of this mood is the sensuality of Isabel Allende's Eva Luna--which has finally engulfed me--or the broad bright magic of the river.  The Amazon.  Here among the weed water—land doused in mile wide water: our world's largest river.   Whether the book or the jungle or the river wind in my face, I'm a bit in love today. 

Curiosity walks me to the back of the boat where the Approachable Fat Man in white reclines on a cooler. "Do you live on the river?" I ask.  "A donde va Usted?"

He does.  He's headed home.

"En que trabajas?"  he responds.

"I'm an artist." 

He extends me his hand as if it were my own, applauding my brave declaration.  And somewhere in this mélange of literary, waterway, South American love story, I find myself.  I shake his hand and am OK being what I am.  This artistic vein of mine, is mine, and far too grown now to weed it out.  He is a painter.  He hands me his card, and his boisterous thick cheeks smile.

Wind in my face.  Jungle and stilted houses at the periphery.  River, river, river.  Like it's only me and her, and the man driving the boat, who could be God, or my destiny, who does not mind when I sit out front on the edge.  "Not too close" though he says, "because if I'm responsible for you falling in, they'll..."