A particularly dear friend had an insight for me in a recent deep and wide-ranging conversation.

I’m used to it – every time we get together we tend to serve as sparks for each others’ thought processes. I wouldn’t trade that kind of kinship and understanding for all the anything in anywhere. But this particular insight was especially chewy for me right now, because I have been doing so much reading and readjusting of my relationship with the Land and the All and Sacred Place and the ugly linearity of time.

He said, in an almost confessional tone, “I don’t even use words anymore when I pray. Now, I just groan.” He laughed, and demonstrated the urgent posture, the tightly clasped hands, the look of anguish, and I could see sweat and tears and all the tangled loves and worries of a truly compassionate and awakened human written all over him. I wasn’t laughing. I said, “Well, God probably doesn’t speak English. They probably speak groan much more fluently.”

And then I thought, of course They speak the language of nature and being (I don’t presume to know the gender of God, so I always use they/them pronouns). Paleo-linguists have postulated in recent years, backed up by the language forms of the few contemporary indigenous people still living, that much of the original human languages were highly onomatopoeic. They made sounds that sounded like what they were describing. We have some of those in English, too. Think about the word river. Say it to yourself, slowly, then quickly. Rrrrrriiiiiii-vvvvvveeerrrrrrr. Ri-ver. There’s nothing stopping the flow of that word, it bends itself around that v like water around a curve (cuuuuurrrrrvvvvvvve is another – there’s a little obstacle, and then whoosh (ha! whoosh! yet another!), clear flowing) with such a sensuous (yep, there’s another) kind of grace. Think about an entire language made up of mostly those kinds of words, and you probably have a good idea of what our ancestors sounded like.

Now, think of what their thoughts must have been like.

Woah. Woooooah. Holy language of God, Batman. Wow. Wooooow. What must it be like to think like that? What must that be like? To have your head so uncluttered by excess language that you could feel the one-ness, the total lack of separation between you and everything? Not trying to explain, just being. Just doing what they do, being who they are. Just … thinking the thoughts of Nature with the mind of God. Can you even imagine? My mind wobbles quite a bit around this idea, but probably because I am thinking about it with fucking words.

It wasn’t necessarily language that did it to us, but it might have been writing. Suddenly, the words we see on paper are “speaking” into our minds in the way God used to.* Do you see the connection? If your language sounds like your world, and your thoughts are uncluttered by nimity-pimity issues of modern communication, you could be in the pure flow of the All with virtually no effort. You would live in the realm of prayer.

Which is why, when my friend said his prayers largely consist of groans and sighs, I immediately saw the power in it. His so-called inarticulate prayers probably reach the ears of God like a hot knife through butter, because he’s expressing what he feels in the most erudite way possible. He says, there are two kinds of prayer: Thank you, and Help. And both of those are better expressed in groans, sighs, moans, humming, and laughter, than by any words in any language.

When I pray or meditate, my words are for me. They’re not for the benefit of God. God doesn’t need to hear words. But the words keep me focused on the work of prayer. The struggle of meditation. It is so hard to get my brain to shut the holy fuck up and just be. There are so many thoughts and ideas and stories and worlds and songs and conversations in here that it takes chanting the five names of God – how arrogant, we have named the Unnamable – to get my brain to stop. And even then it’s touch and go. I live in an agony of mental processes, when all I really want is just to shut up and think like a rock.

We have been programmed every moment of our post-womb existence for separation from God. But it’s that very separation that is, literally, killing us. Same with our obsessive timekeeping. We have been imprisoned in this linearity of time and thought, which feels like it might be Hell, you know what I mean? The Sacred Circularity of the Eternal Now, and the internal silence needed to listen for that singular Voice, are nearly as alien to our culture as … well, aliens. There is a way back. It’s not going to be easy, but it is necessary. There aren’t any maps, but there are stars, and stories, and we have the power of Imagination to help us open the way.

New t-shirt idea: Empty Head, Open Heart.

*Check out David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World for a deeper look into this phenomenon.