Nature is only ever at work.
Take stock of the world around you:
Constantly in movement,
Each action suited to its end.
Fire, with its ferocity and voracity,
devours, ignites, it roars its presence,
and illumines the front.
From it, people recoil.
It singes and scars, but it also clears space.
Some of us must act like fire.
Water, with its elegant, erosive powers;
Steady is the flow of its work.
With direction, sustainability,
A river is what nourishes and carves;
Not a typhoon, which destroys indiscriminately, recedes,
And leaves the people in drought.
Some of us must act like water.
Earth, with its food to eat,
and generative soil;
Its many forms of living companions
to comfort us in times of solitude, of loss.
Earth rejuvenates, and holds us.
Some of us must act like earth.
Air, so integral to all of us we must remind ourselves to notice our breath.
Not one of us lives without it.
Not one of us is untouched by it.
It cannot help but give, and forgive.
Single-minded, it knows everything as one.
Some of us must act like air.
May we each model in our natures,
the best in Nature.
Eternally changing;
Knowing only movement,
And an urge to create life.
Amen, and blessed be.
[The title of this prayer is taken from Kimberly Deckel’s “10 Prayers for a Volatile Election Season.” The prayer was first presented at the Interfaith Prayer Vigil for Hope and Peace on the evening of Wednesday, November 6, 2024, at the First United Methodist Church in Pasadena, California, a vigil whose structure was framed by Deckel’s piece, but that used original prayers written for the occasion.]