A Carton of Inner Peace, Please

Looking out my window. I feel the brisk November breeze caressing my face. Her touch empowers me…like the touch of a goddess. Back inside, I hear a fusion of musical instruments. Among them, I recognize the rich sounds of the guitar, the tamboras, and the humble güira. My mom is playing merengue in the background. Sergio Vargas to be exact. There’s a nice cup of tea waiting for me in the kitchen. Lipton’s chamomille. I savor its mild, flowery taste. It warms my soul…it warms my spirit.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. My thoughts have been all over the place. They lack coherence. They’re one big, jumbled mess. Like a puzzle, I have to put them together. Organize them…somehow. But, I just don’t know how. It’s a tumult. My life that is. Hey! there’s an idea. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just walk into a store and be able to purchase balance and harmony? Like, you walk into a store and ask the nice, old man with the silver hair and wrinkled skin sitting behind the counter: “may I please have two pounds of balance (maybe three, depending on how crazy life is for you at the moment) and one pound of harmony, please?”. You might want to add a carton of inner peace if you ran out of that too.(sigh)

I pray. I’m not religious, but I pray. I pray to something…to someone. I don’t know what exactly it is that I pray to. But, lets just say that I pray to a higher being. I believe in a higher being. Again, I’m not religious, more like spiritual. Anyway, I pray. I actually pray every night before I go to sleep. But, I don’t pray in the usual, standard way. What I mean is, I don’t recite an actual prayer or psalm. Come to think of it, I don’t know the words to any of them really. I just ramble on and on, to myself mostly. Hoping that, in the midst of all this rambling, something or someone out there is listening to me. Listening to my hardships, my agony, my misery. And maybe, just maybe, my prayers are answered.

I feel much better when I pray. Praying doesn’t fix my problems. But, I feel better nonetheless. The fear goes away. It doesn’t go away permanently. It just seems to quiet down for a brief moment. For, it is still lurking in the peripheral. But, in that brief moment, I am reminded once again, that there is still hope.