When I sleep outside to hear the sounds in the night ...
I hear the moon in her passing light and nightly transitions.
I hear her light falling in the cottonwood leaves and
I hear them spin on their long stems, answering. Regenerating
herself, her excess splendor seeds the earth and
each Tree of Life flowers ...
I hear the light and the seeds falling down and other sounds
rising up from the waters hidden beneath this desert ...
When dawn breaks and I awake to the trees in my eyes,
my ears are ringing with the night silence which sings
in my solitude through the day.
We often consider prayer a deliberate act, something that we choose to do, or not. In the 18th century, William Law knew better:
"As the heart willeth and worketh, such, and no other, is its prayer.... For this is the necessity of our nature: pray we must, as sure as our heart is alive; therefore, when the state of our heart is not a spirit of prayer to God, we pray without ceasing to some, or other, part of the creation."
Perhaps as we learn what "part of creation" we have been praying to without knowing it, we can enlarge and re-focus our prayer, until we find that we are not so much praying as being prayed through, and all our own best hopes and the hopes of the world are flowing through us.