Today’s Prayer to Passage will be from the book “The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone” by Olivia Laing.

Today I pray, “Dear God, I recently found a new home in the city where I reside, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. This is fun! I create an empowering context every time I move. This upcoming move to my new city home will be my third move in four months. Two U-Haul rentals. I have stayed in five homes. This will be my sixth home since October, and I am looking forward to knowing that I can feel settled here for a while.

I enjoy moving, yet it can be exhausting. I have refined my material objects to a freeing simplicity. Everything I own, including my car, fits into an empty single-vehicle garage space. I do not own a bed, a couch, or a kitchen table. I have about 12-15 clear plastic boxes in which I am storing most of my material belongings in a storage space outside of the city. In my home residence, I have a suitcase, six pairs of shoes, toothpaste, a toothbrush, deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, body soap, perfume, a pocket-full of jewelry, laundry detergent, and about 50 items of clothing. Plus socks and underwear. And a coffee maker. And a coffee cup.

Here is another way to present it: Everything I have with me in my current home residence fits into my four-passenger car. I will be moving to my new home without a U-Haul — as all of my remarkably organized clear plastic boxes of silverware, dishes, pots, pans, artwork, books, baubles — in addition to a bedside lamp stand, a decorative yet functional buffet table, and a media cabinet — exist in storage for a future date of use and utilization.

My empowering context will be created after I move to my new home. I will keep it to myself. It will involve an energy of adventure. There is an art to being alone. I will have three roommates, yet I will be on my own in a sense. And I love this. This new beginning opens me up to a thriving authenticity and a flourishing growth. A grander becoming of my Self.”

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

“I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.”
—OLIVIA LAING

We feel this way sometimes. I remind the Biggest Audience that though it is enticing to imagine returning to planet earth, or to imagine living here in a “first” incarnation, something to remember or know about being here is that the density loses its luster at times. Spirits in Heaven may crave the density of planet earth; they’ve had their individual ways-of-being at “home”, in the “resting place”. And then we return to earth. And how soon do we remember? Or learn? The density of planet earth is distinct from Heaven for a purpose.

The earthy coziness is a coziness very different than that of coziness in Heaven. We arrive to grow. The contrast, the conflict, the confrontations, the slow moving energy of being here, the limitations, the emotions… sometimes it would feel so good to take a break from it all for a few months, then returning to our respective physical bodies. No need to start anew as infants. Just a three-month hiatus and back to the bodies we’ve got.

All of this physical moving I have accomplished within the past four months has been remarkably dense. Lugging my earthly stuff this way and that on the earthly plane. And it feels so good to be settled in to a home away from home on earth. I like when life becomes cozy again. And for the first time in five months, I feel cozy again. And given the opportunity to be separated from it for awhile, humans crave the down-to-earth coziness again, too.