There's so much you want to say,
but time keeps taking time and all
your words away. How to say—amid
this flood of gratitude and grief—
"Thank you!", or "How beautiful,
how grand!", or "I don't know how
I survived", or "I miss you so," or
"I was changed forever the day
we two joined hands."
As you reach for your last words,
you realize this is it—this ebbing tide
of language called your life, words
trailing into silence, returning to
the source—this unfinished poem
you would have writ, had you not
been awash in wonder, grateful
to be living it.
A long and loving look at the universe we inhabit can actually change us. We can become different persons.
Prayer with nature is a passionate listening to the beating heart of the world. It is appreciation. And it is always praise.
Let us plant dates, even though those who plant them will never eat them ... We must live by the love of what we will never see. This is the secret discipline. It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved away in immediate sense experience, and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.