Today’s Prayer to Passage will be from the book “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf.

Today I pray, “Dear God, Tonight I am staying with a new friend, a woman of wisdom and life experience. In her caring, loving conversation today, she reminded me to ‘Let go and let God.’ I am blessed with the love offerings You provide through people who show how much they care about me. Thank You for this. Amen.”

Following my prayer, I held the closed book in my hands and opened it to reveal this passage:

“For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.”
—VIRGINIA WOOLF

It is a much different, much better experience to be a writer in the company of friends. For 17 months, I lived alone in a large, lavish, three-story turn-of-the-century old home in the F. Scott Fitzgerald neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota. I returned home from my eight-hour work day to sit in silence, to exist in conjunction with what I chose to view on my iPhone, and to write this book. It was a peaceful existence. But weeks and months passed on, and I — in my hermit-writer station of life — grew lonely and isolated, and uncured. There was no inspired creativity making a house call to heal me of my true missing muse: intimacy.

I needed another person around, even if it would be a pal down the hall or in the next room or in the next chair. Or a beloved partner in bed next to me. Think Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie, in Sex and the City — in bed next to Big — she is fashioning her weekly article as Big reads the Times. Or Audrey Hepburn’s character, Holly Golightly, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s — living downstairs from an author in a New York City apartment building. There is something special about having human contact around. The warmth of another body nearby. The breathing in and out of someone other than only me. More than a lone aura in the vicinity. A friend.

It is nice to be staying with a friend, an older, wiser woman, someone I trust who welcomes me with an open heart. And I may heal here. This is true love.