Time for Prayer

To me, right now, there is nothing more beautiful than prayer. And perhaps nothing more necessary. I don’t mean the type of prayer that is asking for money and recognition and material resource. I mean the type of prayer that is a reaching outside of oneself to make contact with the wide world that’s been neglected. This type of prayer guards a precious little space for something to come in and speak to you, to stir your heart into motion and memory.

I am convinced that the lives of humans was once infused with prayer. Ancient holy texts are written in poetry as if it was prose, suggesting that this was the way people spoke in their everyday lives, constantly praising the beauty and magnificence around them. There was also a clear understanding that this praise and prayer was a requirement for life to keep on living. To retract into the internal world and neglect the complex mechanics of nature was not an option—that would be personal and collective suicide.

So it is interesting to observe the world we live in. The continual interchange between human and nature is moderated mostly by machines and specialists so that the average person has little to no knowledge of even the names of grasses growing in their neighborhood, or the meanings of different cloud formations and the weather they portend. And of course most of us can hardly see the night sky to know its stars. If you let in the totality of this loss for even a moment it will shatter your heart. What we have traded for what have gotten has left us in a type of moral, spiritual and natural poverty that is nearly indigestible.

My personal position with the various ecological crises, climate change and the like is that certainly we must act to do whatever we can to reduce our impact on the planet, and all the other measures which are required at this time. But just as important is to feel the grief of the situation we are in, and the breadth and depth of our disconnection from nature, which will be mirrored in our relationship with our own bodies.

Most of us are so rootless—not just as individuals, but as a species with a diminishing memory of the cultural richness we came from—that we do not even understand what has been lost. The last decade of my life has been a search for a tenable root which I could tether myself to so that I might grow into something organic. The search began as an unconscious escape from emotional pain but has evolved into something with more substance and several substantial roots which I am grateful for everyday.

In my mind the two most important action steps for our species are (1) prayer—because the depth of the aimlessness is beyond our individual lifetime and experience and requires divine grace which is absolutely accessible to an open heart, and (2) to begin digging for roots.

In many mythologies the stars are the tips of the roots of trees growing in the world above ours. The stars have been my greatest points of orientation, and the study of Vedic astrology a living root which I could graft myself to. Most of us are transplants in some form or fashion, and descended from people who have been running for a while. The ancestral tendency is to continue running, either physically or psychologically (the most extreme form of this being mental illness like schizophrenia) so as not to get hit with the full impact of the grief accumulated over generations. In the running we have lost our roots and because of that don’t know what we are actually running from, or don’t realize we’re even running.

There is a certain amount of faith required in the decision to stop running, and often it only happens when it is forced upon us. For me this began when my career as a collegiate long distance runner ended in repetitive injury. I was very literally running from something and was devastated in every way when I could no longer rely on that escape. So I tried other forms of exercise to numb myself and in this way injured almost every tendon and ligament in my body. So I ran instead from Wisconsin to Utah. When what I was running from again caught up with me I ran into spiritual retreat and an ascetic lifestyle, then caffeine. The story goes on, the list of creative ways to escape myself turning into a long list of unconscious violence against myself.

What I’m getting at is that I suspect that most of us are doing this in some way, and it is not because we are bad people or dumb or incapable, but because at this point in human history we all come in with a backlog of undigested grief which is nearly impossible for one individual to face head-on with consciousness and particularly with no spiritual resources.

But if we continue running there will always be the sense of dissatisfaction, meaninglessness or that nagging emptiness. Because the ancestor in you remembers a life filled with magic, prayer and relationship with nature. If we are to get anywhere near that living reality again we must first walk through the forgetfulness, numbness and grief. And to even get to that threshold we need a root.

So, I’m offering one root among many: an elegant system of astrology whose inner mechanics are completely dependent on the five elements being the connective tissue between the stars, the, individual and the earth. From here we can see what we are running from, what we might be blind to, what the sky (and thus Nature) is asking of us and what the consequences might be if we continue to resist. And of course the horoscope teaches us how to pray, and which type of prayer might benefit us most: who to pray to, when to pray, what areas of life have been waiting for the food of prayer and are starving (and because of this taking chunks out of our life in various ways).

The bottom line is: the story written in the stars at your moment of birth was your gift. It is a bit adolescent to resist it and complain of “fate” and continue leaning in to an ideal and illusion of freedom while nature suffers our collective indulgence. No one benefits. I am not saying (nor have I ever said) that the chart and your life are completely fated and there is no free will. I don’t even think in those terms. My personal goal is to lean into my birth chart as much as possible so that at some point there is absolutely no resistance. Then I am a living prayer, embodying as closely as possible that particular flavor of the sky at the moment I was born so that is might sing its unique song until the flame goes out and I dissolve into the grass or the sky or the song of a bird at dawn.