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The gesture was simple, instinctive.

But the moment I touched the stone, I heard something clear inside me, almost like a command: Teach people to pray in their own words.

It startled me. I didn’t know what it meant.

At the time, I was just beginning to write again. Lyme had robbed me of many things—my energy, my clarity, even the use of my hands for a time. But slowly, painfully, words were returning.

Writing had become my medicine. I had already begun teaching a course called “Writing the Body Home,” exploring how language could be a path back into presence. But this felt different. This was a call to prayer, not in any formal or religious sense, but something raw and deeply personal.

When I returned home to the hills of Western Massachusetts, I began a new practice. One day each week, I would go completely silent. No phone, no internet, no talking—just presence. I needed to stay connected to the stillness I had felt in Chaco, and to whatever had spoken to me through that stone.

On the very first of those silent days, the words came again: Writing the Prayer of Your Life. I wrote them down, not knowing exactly what they meant, but sensing they carried weight.

Over time, those words began to teach me.

In 2009, I nearly died. One night, in the bitter cold of a New England winter, I was evacuated from my home due to carbon monoxide exposure. I was holding onto life by a thread. In the days that followed, still dazed and weak, I sat down at my notebook. I didn’t know what I was writing—just a plea to the divine, a raw outpouring from the center of my fear and fatigue. I wasn’t trying to be poetic or even coherent. I just needed to speak the truth of my heart.

And what I wrote—what came through that moment of desperation—gave me the courage to keep living.

It wasn’t a miracle cure. I still faced years of recovery—barely able to think clearly, barely able to imagine a future. But day by day, I kept writing. A few words at a time. The words themselves became a rope I could hold onto in the dark. They reminded me that I was still here. That I was still part of something holy, even when I felt far from my own wholeness.

Since then—since Chaco Canyon in 2005 and the carbon monoxide poisoning in 2009—I’ve returned again and again to the practice of Writing the Prayer of Your Life. I’ve practiced it. I’ve taught it. I’ve let it shape me.

And then in early 2025, not long after the presidential inauguration, I found myself deep in despair for the world. Once again, I was facing illness. Once again, I felt cut off from vitality, from vision. The suffering of the Earth and the grief of these times felt overwhelming.

And once again, I turned to the only practice I knew could hold me: writing. Not to perform. Not to produce. But to call out to the Divine, from the real place inside my heart. And once again, this practice helped me return to life.

Because this is what I’ve come to see: we are all carrying a kind of ache in these times. We feel the unraveling of the Earth in our bones. We feel overwhelmed, heartbroken, sometimes numb. It’s not just personal grief—it’s collective. The world is changing so fast, and we don’t always know how to stay connected to what is real, to what is sacred.

But there is a kind of quiet miracle that happens when we let ourselves be with what we feel—not rush to fix it or hide from it, but actually sit down with our hearts and let them speak.

That’s what writing can be. Not performance. Not productivity. But presence. A witnessing. A sacred remembering.

I believe that the root of our suffering—personally and collectively—is that we’ve forgotten the sacredness of life. We’ve forgotten that all life matters. That we belong to one another. That the Earth is not just a resource, but a relative. And when we return to the truth that our own lives, too, are sacred—not only when we’re successful or strong, but even when we’re lost or broken—we begin to remember how to live again.

Each time one of us comes back to that knowing, we contribute something to the healing of the whole.

For me, that remembering comes through words. It comes through the slow, tender practice of writing what is real, holding it with compassion, and listening for the thread of the holy that runs through even the hardest places.

Maybe, in the end, that’s what it means to write the prayer of a life.

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