Dawn Prayer II

This was written during a visit to family in southern Arizona, far from my home habitat in Maine. 

     Morning in the Sonoran Desert brings different qualities to my senses. In the dimness preceding a November dawn, I've heard an owl hooting, coyotes yipping, but mostly silence - until the insistent questioning of a Curve-billed Thrasher begins. The air is chilly, the sky huge and empty. In my morning practice yesterday, I reached down to touch the earth, choosing a smooth rock embedded in the stony and hard-packed ground to put my hands on so I didn't inadvertently get a little spine in my skin. 

I reached down through the rock in gratitude and said, 

"Thank you Mother." 

She pulled me down deeper and said,  

"These are my children, all these rocks, across the surface here and across this desert that you see, and those mountains there before you. These are all my children, these rocks." 

It was as if she pulled me in and let me see through her eyes.

And I said,  

"I see them now. I have not always seen them. I connect more with the living things, but I see the rocks now, how they are your children, how they've been raised up high in the mountains, how they're deep, deep in the earth, how some are shiny and sleek and others are rough, and how they all slowly, slowly give of themselves to become soil, how some are in streams and rivers with water flowing over them, how some are open to the wind, polished by sand blowing over them. I see them now." 

I closed my eyes and could feel the energy of the many -- the many rocks and stones that are the foundation and the offspring of the earth. 

With a stone in my pocket I carry this teaching with me, gratitude for a gift received in my dawn prayer.