I love how author Brian Doyle writes about prayer:
"I have never thought that prayers of request can be answered; I do not think that is the way of the Mercy; yet we do whisper prayers of supplication; I think we always have, since long before our species arrived in this form.
Sometimes I think that beings have been praying since there were such things as beings; I suspect all beings of every sort do pause and revere occasionally, and even if we think, with our poor piddly perceptive apparatus, that they were merely reaching for the sun, or drying their wings, or meditating in the subway station between trains, or chalking the lines of a baseball field ever so slowly and meticulously, perhaps they are praying in their own peculiar particular ways; who is to say?
Who can define that which is a private message to an Inexplicable Recipient?
So that he who says a scrawny plane tree straining for light in a city alley is not a prayer does not know what he is saying, and his words are wind and dust."
(Brian Doyle, One Long River of Song)
