Doodling Prayer

It was ninety degrees two days ago.

This morning it was fifty-two.

And windy.

Although it is March, I remind myself, and no matter where you live, March is its own beast.  Always windy and always unpredictable.

My friends up north are experiencing a horrific blizzard and power outages and cable outages and internet outages—in other words, the Dark Ages.  How are they even surviving?

But the most beautiful thing about March is that sometime in this month, those same friends enduring the snow and the darkness will soon be greeted with longer days and budding trees.

I still remember the tulips the previous owners of my childhood home in New York had planted and how much I looked forward to seeing them bloom each spring.

If I had to pick one month that was symbolic of life in general, I would choose March, wild and crazy, yet beautiful and filled with hope.

This morning I attended a Creative Prayer workshop led by my friend Laura.  There were about a dozen of us—brave souls, so many tend to flee when asked to be creative, but all were there this morning to learn something new, to find some new avenue perhaps, some new way of connecting with God.

Or maybe we were looking for affirmation that our creative spirits had already brought us closer to God, affirmation that each one of us has a creative spirit that needs to be nurtured and loved and fed.

We watched a video on sand art and saw a man capture the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus through a swipe of his fingers through sand, using negative space and relief to make each swipe a revelation. 

It was beautiful.

We practiced Doodle Prayer, which is just as it sounds, doodling while praying for someone.  My mom was the best doodler I had ever seen.  I used to sit next to her at the kitchen table when she was on the phone with someone and just watch her doodle on the phone book, on a napkin.  She used to draw profiles of people, men and women that I had never met, but seemed so real.

As I doodled a prayer this morning, I thought, I did not inherit my mother’s gift at doodling.

I tend to overthink when all I should be doing is feeling.

I prayed for a woman who I had been asked to pray for, a woman I had never met.

I drew three mountain peaks and three ocean waves.  I drew clusters of rocks, six rocks to each mound.  I drew shepherd’s crooks, nine of them, curled to even look like nines. 

I’m afraid as I doodled that my math may have been showing.

I wanted a trinity of things in the prayer, things of three and multiples of three.  Three flowers with six petals on each flower.

In the end I’m not sure what any of it meant, except that I gave that time to God and lifted this woman to Him in prayer.

We painted rocks and were asked to take three.

See I’m not the only one who appreciates that number.

“Invest in Faith,” I wrote on one.

“Return to Hope,” on another.

“The Greatest of these is Love,” on the third.

The first two fell into a crack between the seats in my car on the way home—you all know that crack, the one in which stray fries, receipts and forgotten keys disappear forever to.

Laura asked me to speak to the group this morning briefly on photography and what I do each day when I go out taking pictures.  I spoke of how my journey started, with health problems and a need to find purpose and how that purpose became getting to church daily, taking pictures, thinking about God and posting those things online, how I realized that those pictures were “Windows of Hope” as I called them to the few people who saw them.

But even if it was just one person who saw my pictures, that was enough.

Because when you view my pictures, you inhabit that space with me, you live that moment with me. 

And because God is there, He is with you too.

At the Wetlands this morning, the birds were huddled together, trying to keep warm.

Nothing brings me more joy these days than to watch my Great Blue Heron babies grow.  They are so big now, but so fragile.  They have such personality, squabbling with each other, picking fights, but leaning into one another too, for protection against the wind and predators.

I am so blessed.

We are all so loved.