Asyouare, soIam.

My alone feels so good. I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.

The powers of prayer contains many layers. From a subconscious level, prayer is repetition, they could also be seen as affirmations. When said silently or verbally, with intention, we can prime our unconscious minds to direct our behavior toward an honest goal. From an energetic level, if we see thought as energy beaming out into the universe, this language is a signal to be picked up from spirits all around us who are working diligently to answer our “prayers”. Prayers become effective when they come from an unselfish attitude. Prayer is also meditation, a mantra, if we repeat any phrase with intent, we may eventually reach a meditative, theta state, a state of conscious relaxation, healing, and presence.

I told Miyazaki I love the “gratuitous motion” in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are. "We have a word for that in Japanese," he said. "It’s called ma. Emptiness. It’s there intentionally.” Is that like the “pillow words” that separate phrases in Japanese poetry? "I don’t think it’s like the pillow word." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.

Trust yourself. At the root, at the core, there is pure sanity, pure openness. Don’t trust what you have been taught, what you think, what you believe, what you hope. Deeper than that, trust the silence of your being.