Pray to learn how to live beneath the rules.
Once, when I was barely more than a baby, I lived as an uninvited guest inside my own skin, a stranger wandering the rooms of a body marked by an unnamed malady. A quiet fracture in the flesh, an invisible seam — yet no one in my family ever traced its tender line or laid a word along its edge. When our anguish goes unnamed, we hang it on a small metal thought, a rivet in the mind, hoping the act might bless the hurt into meaning. But the ones I called home wrapped it in silence instead, as if it were a brittle heirloom kept in the dark corner of a drawer — an inherited conviction that anomalies fade when left unattended long enough.
Many moons have since passed, and in that long hush I learned to accept it — with a trembling, hesitant grace, though not without ache. Acceptance did not arrive like a shining revelation; it seeped in, the way dusk stains the sky — slow, reluctant, and strangely tender. I learned to bend around my limits the way a river bends: slowly, by surrendering to its own current.
Before I could coo or babble or string together a murmur rising where speech could not yet stand, I learned to pray. It was instinct, I think — nature’s own whisper urging my body toward hope, toward the thin light that makes endurance possible. Prayer became my language before language itself, my way of pleading to the unseen.
More than half a century went by in a blink, so it seems, I am still listening for an echo — a resonance in answer to all my hushed supplications. My childhood pleas shared a single theme: Let a miracle find me! Yet heaven, I have learned, keeps its own counsel. The universe, no matter how boundless, runs by rules older than desire. Even miracles seem to ask permission before they descend on earth.
I used to imagine that if I just believed hard enough, some rule would break in my favor, some secret door would open to compensate me with dividends. But even the galaxies turn by strict design, unbothered by the quiet sobs. Rules do not bow to hope; they precede it, frame it, and often refuse it. Still, the heart goes on asking, the way a wounded bird keeps fluttering against the sky it cannot reach.
There must have been a first moment for everything — a puff before the first star burned, a hush before the first heartbeat. In that shivering instant, no one can say with certainty how law and chance and wild possibility braided together so carefully, so ruthlessly, that life became inevitable. Perhaps luck laid a gentle hand on the shoulder of the rules, or perhaps something unseen leaned close and whispered, Grow, into the barren dust.
It soothes the mind to imagine that the laws of existence paused to consider mercy, that they conspired not for emptiness but for blossom, coaxing oceans from stone and breath from dust. From that mystery, everything began to unfold — feather, fang, blossom, bone — and in time, beings like us, standing here, asking questions that have no simple resting place.
To our limited senses, the world now looks grand: a jeweled sky, a green and turning earth, the holy architecture of the body, flawed and miraculous at once. But the rules that cradle all this wonder are not pure, not kind, not tailored to the tender skeleton of each life; they are simply workable, efficient, indifferent to whether a child walks easily or stumbles through every step, endlessly. They hold most things together most of the time — but not always. For that, we must be grateful, even as they leave certain hearts hurting on the margins.
To press these vast, indifferent laws of the universe into the small, trembling box of the human psyche feels almost absurd—like trying to paint the whole night sky on a single canvas. And yet this is what we do: we tell stories, spin and shape metaphors, trace our wounds into constellations so we might believe our despair somehow carries us toward atonement, and that even unanswered prayers can still shimmer with meaning. In that fragile, defiant turn of hand and heart, grace sometimes finds its way to us—not to heal, but to help us breathe beside what will not mend. Until.
Making of:
The seed was an instinctive sense that prayer had arrived in this life before concepts of God, doctrine, or language itself.
An attempt to honor prayer as a bodily reflex—almost animlistic—rather than a neat theological position.
Cosmic imagery and “the rules” came in later drafts, as a way to place small human pleas against an indifferent, law-bound universe.
The tension of the essay lives between two longings: to be spared from pain, and to be given strength to live within what will not change.