My Life is a Moving Prayer

Inhale

Exhale

Pause

Happy St. Patrick's Day

A few weeks ago I read about sacred Blue Lotus Essential Oils used in meditation. I decided to order some. Sahu Sacred Oils are made the ancient way by a dedicated family in Egypt who owns the press and who work alongside hardworking farmers and workers to produce these sacred essences and bring them to life and to the world in a sustainable way that supports the family and community. Craftsmanship at its finest.

My little bottle of Sacred Blue Lotus Essential oil came in the mail yesterday and I was excited to try it. I opened the box and found the bottle lovingly wrapped in bubble wrap to keep it safe.

As I began to unwrap the bubble wrap I could smell a hint of the fragrance. Perhaps a bit had been on the packaging. As I opened the bottle, the scent was soft, fragrant, sweet, and ancient.

I closed my eyes for a moment as I breathed in the sacred scent and imagined myself as a scribe in ancient times sitting near the Nile River writing on a pieces of papyrus.

I anointed myself with a bit of the oil on my wrists and on my third eye...the place on my forehead between my eyebrows. The chakra is called the Ajna. The place for intuition and insight.

This essential oil calms mental chatter and is used in meditation and helps connect to inner wisdom...I went to bed with the scent still lingering...The veil between worlds softened. I dreamed a profound dream.

A Moving Prayer: Lotus, Clover, and the Scribe Within

And something opened.

I did not merely dream.

I entered a temple shaped as a home.

I dreamed of Diane, a friend.

The entrance to her home was filled with flowers

—every color, every hue—

arranged with such care and beauty.

The entrance itself felt like an offering:

glass, light, blossoms everywhere.

Nothing sparse.

Nothing held back.

Glass vases, glass shelves, all held the gorgeous flowers.

The light from the sun was coming in windows that only

magnified their illumination.

The flowers were a testament

not decoration.

Each blossom a life,

a memory,

each petal an offering

that had not been lost.

And then a word moved through the dream like a quiet current:

succotash.

Not a word I use. Not a word I think about.

And yet there it was, again and again.

It flowed like a gentle river throughout the dream.

When I woke, I sat with it.

Diane is deeply Catholic.

The last time we spoke was after her mother passed.

I listened as she shared her grief.

At some point I told her, gently and honestly:

"I know grief and knowing grief is a constant companion of mine."

"My life has become a moving prayer.”

At the time, I didn’t fully understand the weight of those words.

But the dream did.

It showed me something I had not yet seen clearly:

A home (in a dream is the self or soul) filled with flowers is a life fully lived and offered in abundance.

Nothing removed.

Nothing hidden.

Nothing deemed unworthy.

And succotash—that simple mixture of corn and beans—became something more.

A symbol of everything gathered together.

The ordinary.

The sacred.

The grief.

The laughter.

The noise of a childhood kitchen.

The quiet of the woods behind my home.

The grandchildren at my table.

The losses I have carried.

The beauty I have witnessed.

All of it.

Mixed.

Nourishing.

Whole.

Succotash is the language of the earth speaking.

I realized something as I sat with my journal this morning:

I am not writing my life in pieces.

I am writing it as it has always been—

a single, continuous offering where everything is meant to be connected.

I used to think prayer lived in quiet places.

In stillness.

In sacred spaces set apart.

But now I see:

My life did not become sacred when it grew quiet.

It became sacred when I recognized that nothing in it needed to be excluded.

Not the hard moments.

Not the messy ones.

Not the joyful ones either.

Everything belongs.

There is something else unfolding too.

I have always felt drawn to the image of the scribe. Recently, I even found myself wondering if I had once been a scribe in another lifetime—perhaps in Egypt, sitting near the Nile, recording what mattered.

But today, I see it differently.

Whether or not that is true does not matter.

Because I am a scribe now.

Here.

At my desk.

In Minnesota.

With several notebooks, and several pens, a Yoga laptop, candles lit,

and the faint scent of lotus still lingers.

And perhaps that is the real return.

Not to another life—

but to this one, seen clearly.

The lotus rises from still water.

The Celtic spiral returns again and again, each time deeper.

And I find myself somewhere in between—

an Irish lass with a heart full of story,

writing her way into coherence.

My life is a moving prayer.

And I am finally beginning to see:

it always has been.

Scribe of the present moment -

where all threads are gathered and made sacred.

No separation between:

The 10th child of 12 born to Irish Catholic parents

the mother to four sons

the grandmother at the table with her 12 grandchildren

the small girl standing on a chair at the sink with hands immersed in water doing dishes

the one who practices yoga and walks in the woods

the one grieving

the one laughing

the one who invites stillness

the one who talks to trees, birds, angels, and guides

Allowing them all to sit together at the same table and speak.

A true scribe does not force a story:

she listens

she receives

she honors

she trusts the truth is beautiful when it is allowed to be whole

I do not write to become whole. I write because I am willing to see that I already am.

Angela the luminous scribe of two rivers...the lotus of the Nile rising in awareness from the mud, the stem emerges out of the water searching for light.

And the Irish lass and the spiral of Eire -

earth, green mist, memory, and land of the mystics.

The Soul opens and remembers. Egyptian scribe wrote of the eternal and the Irish scribe sang its lyrics to the land with humor, warmth, rhythm, and honesty. I do both. I write and the writing breathes. I rest inside the source of both. I rise and I rest in both.