Wild Prayers

Now is the time to strip down to the basics, to call out from the deepest part

of our soul, to go barefoot on the thirsty land, to listen to the night owls call

over the distance of hunger. Now is the time to send up our wild prayers

while there is still time, while there is just enough time to remember who we

are and what we have come here to do.

Our prayers are born within the dark times. We offer prayers for the species

gone extinct, praise for the rivers run dry, prayers as we plant seeds in the

ground, kneeling to the mystery of life until we want to dance, throw off our

name, forget the heavy burdens of shame and self-doubt.

We pray for the hungry, the homeless, for the reckless and lost, for the ones

who pass by nameless. We set out food and invite them all to feast.

We pray that the benefit from the food we eat be shared with all who hunger,

and despite a small voice that says what good does that do? we persist.

We pray for forgiveness: from others for the times we withheld our

love from a sense of lack, and from ourselves for the times we hung back in

the shadows for fear of shining.

We pray to continue practicing patience, to think before we speak, to speak

from a place of kindness.

Because against all odds we have chosen kindness over war, care over

speed, enough over more, we have taken the other, the stranger, the dark

eyed one deep into our hearts where we grieve together over orchards gone

up in flames, homes destroyed, and the children, the children passed from

this earth as angels pass – quickly, a light gone out in the winds of war.

We sit with the dying, console the living, apply the medicine of deep

listening. Because we carry a piece of their story everywhere we go, because now

we belong to each other, we scatter their ashes mixed with seeds that

grow into trees bearing pomegranates, trees that scatter their holy offerings

onto the ground to grow more trees so that the stories of the ancestors are

passed down in the very food we eat, through the juices from the ripe fruits

we savor.

Because the odds seem stacked against us, the ancestors come in the night

and whisper the names of my children’s children’s children and show me

that they are thriving, have made it across the abyss from this dark ending

into a new beginning with just a pocketful of seeds and the song of the raven

who sing here, plant here, who sing all will be well, all will be well.

Prayer by prayer we whisper our love songs into the baby bird mouths of the

warriors who, may it be so, will grow weary of blood and the cry of

vengeance and want only to lie under the willow and hear the old stories as

they pass down through the soft mouths of women.

We pray for a download of mercy for us all. May we banish all doubt that

we are gifted, that what we say and do matters, that we are loved by Spirit

beyond our understanding.

It is safe, it is time, to pledge ourselves to live fully during this time of brutal

endings and to the new beginning which is just visible now on the horizon as

more of us awaken with new prayers for peace on our lips, with a new word

to revive and revitalize the hope for peace. And always the one word we

pray in any language, the only word, the final word is love. Just love.

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Read more stories like this in my book The Ripening: Essays on Love, Loss,

Marriage and Aging available on Amazon.