The Prayer of Pecans
Lately, I’ve been waking up early. Sometime between 4:30 and 5:30 in the morning. I stumble around on a foot acting up with plantar fasciitis. Let the dog out. Make coffee. Sit.
There’s a stack of books I’m working through, including one on the Franciscan Lectio. Conventional Lectio Divina is a meditative way to read Scripture and engage in prayer and dialogue with the Divine, but Franciscan Lectio takes it a step further. Here, we “read” the world. Our relationships, our work, our experiences — each little facet of existence — is a “book” we read and consider. The cosmos is the library.
This morning, we’re experiencing the “False Fall” of North Carolina Summers. It is cool and easy outside. There’s a hint of breeze. These last few days have been a welcome break from the humid soup of July and August around here. And while we know we’ll be back in the heat for a few more weeks very soon, it is lovely to be able to breathe a bit.
There’s a large pecan tree just steps off our back deck whose branches stretch over the deck and the back part of our roof. The breeze is enough to shake a few of those pecans loose, and so every little while, there’s a knock. Sometimes a loud one. Enough for me to ask, “what was that?”
It is the Universe knocking, telling me to read it.
Put the book down and read the trees.
Put the book down: the milled and manufactured secondary product, the mediated thing, the industrious word.
And read, instead, The Word. Written in bark and nuts and leaves.
Leave the leaves and pages of the paper book for a time. Page through what’s happening over here and over here and over here. The cricket chatter. The dogs who bark at everything. The sound of sips.
Soon enough, the pecans will stop knocking and we’ll be called to a less explicit invitation to read our world. Or maybe just a less auditory one: the leaves fall next. Those are subject to a softer form of gravity, though, and a more seductive one. For now, the pecans say: awake.