When your hands ache and you call it prayer

There's a point in the night where the burn in your fingers stops being pain and starts being a kind of devotion. I've been binding a book in calfskin—nothing fancy, just a solid spine for a client's father's journal—and every pull of the thread feels like a line I'm saying back to the quiet. Maybe that's what this work is: a slow, bodily prayer you don't even realize you're praying until your hands give out.