A centering prayer offered by Joanna Macy during her podcast interview with Emergence Magazine.

Such Singing in the Wild Branches by Mary Oliver

Such Singing in the Wild Branches is a poem written in 2003 and is contained in the volume Owls and Other Fantasies. 

This prayer is a wonderful call and response for small groups or a beautiful prayer to be taken outside to your wild sanctuary and spoken aloud as a commitment to learn, lean into, and protect the ground of our being, our Mother Earth. This is a great prayer for Earth Day! The teachings of the great Benedictine abbess of the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen, echo the wisdom contained within the Chinook Prayer, Teach Us and Show Us the Way:

“The earth is at the same time mother, she is mother of all that is natural, mother of all that is human. She is the mother of all, for contained in her are the seeds of all.”

This poem invites us to perceive the wild around us with more clarity, to witness a whole working order that exists without the human crown. I am curious if Mary Oliver wouldn’t also suggest that this way of seeing moves us from KINGdom to KINdom. What do you think?

The darkness is one of the wisest of teachers. If you have grown up with a solar-oriented spirituality than this sentiment might be new to you, especially if the dark is always associated with scarcity, fear, the absence of God, etc. David Whyte’s poem gets to the heart of the gift of the dark, an especially powerful perspective in our times living through a global pandemic.

This blessing prayer invites a presence of stillness so quieted so that one can listen deeply into their emplacement.

One of my favorite poems that I first came across years ago taped to a wall at The Whidbey Institute. It is my reminder to again and again find myself within the woods. And, I think it offers a different way of reflecting on our pandemic times. What does it mean to be lost? What does it mean to be found?

Encircling prayers or loricas, also known as Caim prayers (from the Irish gaelic meaning ‘protection’), are used to create a ring of safety around one's self and their beloveds. It is a way to pray within the physical dimension as it requires the body to actively participate in the supplications of the heart. When one participates with and prays a Caim, the invocation begins with an arm extended outwards, pointer finger set towards the ground tracing the shape of a circle. This intentional act creates a sacred sphere, a space within which the pray-er invokes the protection of Divine Presence.

When I was the stream,
When I was the forest,
When I was still the field,
When I was every hoof, foot, fin and wing,
When I was the sky itself,
No one ever asked me did I have a purpose,
No one ever wondered was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing I could not love.

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.

Earth, Teach Me

Earth, teach me of waiting
as the wild ones who rest within your folds,
and the buds who sit seasonally dormant upon the branch.