A Cosmic Prayer: Realizing Our Interconnection

What a morning! It began routinely enough: I awoke to the birds chirping outside my window, my cats and dog greeted me, and then I began a twenty-minute sitting meditation to calm myself before beginning my more mundane tasks of getting kids up and to school. Once my teenage son was on his way to school, and before waking my youngest son, I went for a walk with my dog. The day was exquisite. I began singing a Jewish prayer giving gratitude to the Goddess/God/Spirit of the Universe for returning my soul to me so I could be present and alive in this world.

As I sang and walked, I took in the depth of my gratitude—what an amazing gift to be here. I then began a prayer of gratitude for the workings of my body ("Blessed is Goddess who heals all flesh and does wonders"). In a Jewish Renewal community in the San Francisco Bay Area I learned to expand this prayer of gratitude for my body parts and the amazing miracle of life. Now, every time I say this prayer, I name all the parts of my body, visualize how they work, and give gratitude that they function properly and allow me to experience life the way I do.

From the Mundane to the Sublime

As I walked my dog, I focused first on the amazing gift of sight. When I thought about how my eyes let me take in the beauty and awe of the universe, I was quickly reminded that, without my brain, what my eyes see would elude my experience. And without my consciousness, I could not appreciate any of it.

As I went through this prayer, which seemed so simple in its original Hebrew, it took on a breadth and depth that for me captured the true miracle of life—and my small yet meaningful role in the whole. My compassion for others expanded as I realized that I see and experience the world in a particular way because I have my eyes, brain, and heart, and if I had someone else's brain (even in combination with my eyes and my heart), I would experience and see the world very differently. This realization allowed me to appreciate how one has no idea how others experience their reality unless one is willing to really be present with and to them.

As I deepened even further in this prayer, I began to see myself as a star—one part of the whole of the universe. From there, my prayers expanded to express gratitude for the beauty of the universe, and I just flowed in and out, expanding and contracting, feeling gratitude for me as part of the universe and then experiencing gratitude for all the other parts of the universe that help make up the whole. That recognition helped me more fully understand how, just as the parts of my body make up a conscious whole not reducible to the sum of its parts, so too the consciousness of the universe cannot be reduced to the sum of its individual parts or manifestations.

The sublime is closer than we realize! A simple prayer can transform a neighborhood walk into an experience of the divine.

I experienced a beautiful dance in this flow, and as I was dancing, I reflected on a conversation I had the other night. Friends and I were discussing what a tragedy it would be if humans destroyed the planet, seeing as we are a part of the planet—part of its transformative process. In other words, humans are not separate from or greater than a star, a planet, an animal, a tree, or any other part of the universe. We are a part of it. We are the part that has consciousness, that has the ability to see when we are doing harm and to make choices that are not harmful. We are the part that can take in the beauty and awe of the universe, see its glory, and celebrate and honor it. Without us, the universe would not...