The same friend that sent me the quote from yesterday’s post also sent me the poem below. It is by Diane Ackerman, American essayist, poet, and naturalist.
Honoring life is a rather ongoing learning isn’t it. There’s the seemingly easier things — honoring the rising sun in the start of a day, the friend that does something nice for us during the day, the meal that we get to have together at the end of the day.
There’s also honoring the more challenging things — the sorrow from loss of loved one that bites in each quiet moment, the punishing exclusion created by someone’s bitterness or blame, the struggle of a group of people trying to wade through together what they can’t wade through alone, the simple annoyance of a fly buzzing round my head because I accidentally left the window open.
In the easy, honoring seems, well, easier to find. In the challenge, it often requires a stretch. In both the easy and the challenge, life, inside and outside of us, is unfolding. Not always, but often enough, grace appears in a way that let’s me glimpse this.
Enjoy this poem, a commitment to honoring life, called School Prayer.
.
School Prayer
In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,
I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.
In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,
I will honor all life
— wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell — on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.
