To our family & friends (near and far)

If the only prayer
you ever say in your entire life is
thank you,
it will be enough.

Meister Eckhart

The Circle of Days

We offer thanks and praise
For the circle of our days.
Praise for radiant brother sun,
Who makes the hours around us run.
For sister moon, and for the stars,
Brilliant, precious, always ours.
Praise for brothers wind and air,
Serene or cloudy, foul or fair.
For sister water, clear and chaste,
Useful, humble, good to taste.
For fire, our brother, strong and bright,
Whose joy illuminates the night.
Praise for our sister, mother earth,
Who cares for each of us from birth.
For all our children, fierce or mild,
For sister, brother, parent, child.
For creatures wild, and creatures tame,
For hunter, hunted, both the same.
For brother sleep, and sister death,
Who tend the borders of our breath.
For desert, orchard, rock, and tree,
For forest, meadow, mountain, sea,
For fruit and flower, plant and bush,
For morning robin, evening thrush.
For all your gifts, of every kind,
We offer praise with quiet mind.
Be with us and guide our ways
Around the circle of our days.
–Reeve Lindbergh
(from Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun)

[i thank You God for most this amazing]

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
which 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 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 unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-e. e. cummings

A hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer life
depends on the labors of other men, living and dead,
and that I must exert myself in order
to give in the full measure I have received and am still receiving.
~ Albert Einstein

Invocation
Oklahoma Academy of Science
7 November 1997

Let us give thanks for chaos and logos and implicate order;
for dark matter, bright galaxies, and nonlocal connections;
for crystals and continents;
for Lucy’s skull and Mary Leakey’s footprints in volcanic ash;
for Thales’ water, Heraclitus’ fire, and Pythagorean forms;
for the Indian zero, algebra, and algorithms;
for the oscillations of the Yin and the Yang;
for acupuncture, Su Sung’s astronomical clock,
and Huang Tao P’o’s textile technology;
for Arabic alchemists on the Old Silk Road
and Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine;
for Euclid and Newton and “God playing dice”;
for Kepler’s snowflake and Kekulè’s dream;
for Mendel’s monastery peas and the genetic Tetragrammaton
on the spiral staircase of life;
for fractals, ferns and fall foliage;
for caterpillars and cocoons; for the infant’s first cry;
for Pachelbel’s canon;
for stained glass windows, Leeuwenhoek’s microscope,
and the Galileo probe;
for the World Wide Web to help us
become conscious of cosmic interconnectedness;
but most of all,
let us give thanks for the twin passions which make us fully human
–the yearning to transcend the boundaries of time and space
by learning and by loving.
Ingrid Shafer

A grateful thought toward heaven is of itself a prayer.
~ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty;
not on your past misfortunes of which all men have some.
~ Charles Dickens

May you be blessed with discomfort
at easy answers, half-truths, and
superficial relationships,
so that you may live deep
within your heart.
May you be blessed with anger
at injustice, oppression, and
exploitation of people,
so that you may work
for justice, freedom and peace.
May you be blessed with tears to shed
for those who suffer from pain,
rejection, starvation and war,
so that you may reach out your hand
to comfort them
and to turn their pain into joy.
May you be blessed with enough foolishness
to believe that you can make
a difference in this world,
so that you can do what others
claim cannot be done.
Amen.

Beannachtaí an tSéasúir,
(Blessings of the Season)

David, Jacki & James

If there’s ever an answer, it’s more love.
Tim O’Brien