Make me like one of your leaves
  Thirsty for light

Make me like one of your rocks
   Quiet to the core

Make me like one of your raindrops
      Joining the river

Make me like one of your feathers
      Floating in uncertainty

Make me like one of your stars
      Shining through darkness

Make me like You
     Able to love.
~Spence Pfleiderer “A Simple Morning Prayer”

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

through the woods, then out into the open fields
past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky.
~David Budbill “Winter: Tonight: Sunset” from While We’ve Still Got Feet

I thank you God for most this amazing day
For the leaping greenly spirits of trees
And a blue true dream of sky
And for everything that is natural, which is infinite, which is yes
I who have died am alive again today
And this is the sun’s birthday
This is the birth day of life and of love and wings
And of the gay great happening illimitably earth
How should tasting, touching, hearing, seeing, breathing any
Lifted from the no of all nothing
Human merely being doubt unimaginable You?
Now the ears of my ears awake
And now the eyes of my eyes are opened
~E. E. Cummings~

Each day,
no matter how things feel,
no matter how tired or distracted I am,
no matter how empty or discouraged,
no matter how worried, or fearful or heartsick:

it is up to me to distill my very existence down
to this moment of beauty that will never come again;
I’m given the unimaginable opportunity to be loving
with every cell of my being.

One breath, one blink, one pause, one whispered word again and again:
thanks, thanks, thanks be to God.