The world outside is veiled in a mist, a natural shroud rendering the familiar unfamiliar. Beyond my window, trees stand still, their dark branches etched like delicate filigree against the dawn’s pale blue canvas.

Wrapped in the warmth of my shawl, I am seated at my desk, the hum of the furnace mingling with the ethereal voices of Stile Antico’s “Sanctus: Benedictus”—holy and blessed, they sing.

As the morning unfolds, a silent mist glides over the river, rising and swirling like whispered prayers sent to watching angels.

In this quietude, my heart sends out its own prayers:

• For the safety of all on this chilled day.
• For the homeless to find sanctuary against the bone-biting cold.
• For the caregivers, whose tireless efforts are lifelines in the dark waters of despair.
• For the disheartened, whose dreams and hopes seem to dissipate like morning fog.
• For wars to cease, and peace to settle softly upon the earth, quelling the violence and awakening awe in every heart.

I pray, too, for a path to peace to unveil itself before war extinguishes our collective breath.

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I am in the midst of a 21-day journey—a course on prayer—chosen as spontaneously as the mist chooses its path each morning.

Prayer was my mother’s refuge, a legacy she passed to my sister, Jackie, who embraced it as naturally as breathing. As for me, prayer felt like an admission of weakness, a legacy of a rigid Catholic upbringing where an omnipresent God watched but seldom seemed compassionate. Vulnerability, I believed, was an invitation for wounds rather than healing.

Yet, as this new decade of my life unfolds, I am driven to challenge such relics of belief. Prayer, I am discovering, is not a weakness but a communion; vulnerability, not an exposure to harm, but an opening to grace.

It’s in the act of surrender that I’m finding unexpected strength. In the willingness to let go of my resistance to question the unexamined tenets I’ve held—not because they serve me, but because their familiarity is a deceptive comfort.

Like the mist that conceals yet reveals, I am learning to navigate through the opacity of my doubts and fears. To trust in the insights that come from not knowing, from being present in the discomfort of exploration.

Change, like the ever-shifting mist, is constant. And in its midst, I find that prayer, too, has found its steadfast place in my life.

Namaste