The Square Root of Ominous Existentialism is Just Prayer, I Guess

This morning the rising sun shone through the window directly into the shower, directly into the water on my face, fracturing into light beams directed to my soul –

I had a vision of an image of a version of me stripped down to absolutely nothing, a version of us all stripped down, a world where we have nothing at all, a sort of foggy nowhere nothing land, and there, naked, I asked myself

What, then, am I? and the light fractured, and in it God spoke – no, God did not speak, but God showed me the version of myself:

Out of the fog, the despair, the ashy smoke, their voices came, came to me as I sat in meditation, or prayer, movement, or –

“Will you pray for us,” the people asked, when I was nothing –

They turned to me and asked me to pray for them? “in our own language?” they whispered – and, in that moment, my tears fractured the nothing-light

“Teach me to pray in your language,” I said. And then I did: I prayed for all the people, in their own way, in their own tongue.

And I remembered all the many books I had read, all the times I bowed my head, the thousand poems, the thousand stories, a million things they’d said – all prayers.

In the shower, the sun continued to rise through the window, blindingly bright.

Later, I walked through the bitter wind, dressed, toward the nothing building to do nothing things and I wondered, what language does God use to speak to me?

And the light passed over my face.

bb
2026