Kitchen Window Prayer

This was not my hummingbird, but the red flowers look a little like the ones in my garden. Photo courtesy of Pexels. Photographer Djalma Paiva Armelia, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

I did not plan to pray at my kitchen window.

I have a morning routine that I try to do. My Centering Prayer time most mornings occurs in the rocking chair in my bedroom after my bed is made, the cat box cleaned, and I’ve had a cup of tea or two. There is an order to these things.

Somehow, though, I found myself at the kitchen window the other morning. The ground was wet from the remnants of Hurricane Hilary that turned into Tropical Storm Hilary that brought beautiful measurable rain to our little town. So I went outside to sink my feet into the damp earth and filled up the birdfeeder and scattered sunflower seeds for the squirrels and also the bigger birds that have a hard time balancing on the feeder. Usually, the squirrels find the seeds that I toss out for them, but the ones they miss often turn into sunflowers. I have sunflowers of all sizes growing in my front yard by the birdfeeder, which makes me strangely happy.

I came inside and cut up the cantaloupe that had been sitting on the sink for a week or so and found a clean container to store it in. I washed the dishes from last night. I finally spiralized the zucchini that I had picked a few days earlier. It was a big guy and filled an entire container with zoodle type noodles. We will see how those zoodles taste. I made myself a nice breakfast: a little diced zucchini (from the parts of the zucchini that wouldn’t spiralize), with eggs and onion.

(I have been eating a lot of squash for breakfast these days with my eggs. Also eggplant. It’s what happens when the garden is growing like gangbusters, which is something my Mom used to say.)

Time passes when you stare out the kitchen window, watching a hummingbird find nectar from red flowers and then doing other ordinary tasks that fill up a morning. I didn’t make it to my bedroom to the rocking chair for my Centering Prayer time after all.

In the past, I might have felt bad about that.

But I am learning to think about my mornings (and my life, actually) another way. Especially mornings like that one. Maybe everything I did that morning was prayer: the zucchini spiralizing, the birdfeeder filling, the cantaloupe cutting, the dish washing, the breakfast cooking. Feeding myself, feeding Biscuit, feeding the birds. It sure seemed that way.

It was a lovely morning, and it was a treat to stand at the kitchen window and take in the cool and damp, weather unheard of for mid-August.  It would have seemed wrong to leave it, to ignore it, to go back to my bedroom and sit in my rocking chair and close my eyes. I would have missed all that light.

I did not plan to pray at my kitchen window the other morning. But I think I did anyway.