A hymn to the numinous splendor of nature.
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” wrote the French philosopher Simone Weil in contemplating gravity and grace. “Attention without feeling,” the poet Mary Oliver observed many decades later, “is only a report. ” Indeed, what confers meaning upon our existence, what gives it an undertone of secular prayerfulness, is precisely this empathic beam of attention to all the world’s fullness, to all of its creatures.
An incantation for honing that attention is what the poet, essayist, science writer, and naturalist Diane Ackerman offers in a beautiful poem titled “School Prayer,” originally published in her poetry collection I Praise My Destroyer (public library) and later included in her prose inquiry into the evolutionary and existential purpose of deep play.
A great deal of Ackerman’s exquisite writing is devoted to celebrating science. (Carl Sagan, who was on her dissertation committee, was an ardent admirer of her work and once sent her radiant poems about the Solar System to Timothy…
The post School Prayer: Diane Ackerman’s Poetic Invitation to Attentive Presence as a Means of Transcendence and Secular Spirituality appeared first on FeedBox.