A CALL TO EARTH PRAYERWE NEED TO PRAY, ELIAS said one afternoon. We both sat silent. Pray? What did that mean to us? We had long since wandered from the traditions of our early religious teachings. While we meditated regularly and valued times of silence and contemplation, the notion of prayer awakened in us a new desire -- the desire for a communal liturgy directed toward healing human-Earth relations. We wanted to link our personal spiritual life with that of the entire biosphere. Perhaps everything prays -- not only humans.This book is a call to prayer. Several years ago, as we began to grasp the extent of the damage being done to the Earth's life systems, we were filled with deep sadness. So much is being lost -- so much richness and natural beauty that our children will never know, perhaps never even miss! How can we heal all that we have disrupted and polluted? Of course, our society and our daily lives have to change. Yet the healing of our relationship with this planet ultimately needs to emerge from our hearts and our spirits.The idea empowered us. We found ourselves looking through bookstores for prayer traditions that might capture what was in our hearts. Several journals and magazines offered to print our call for "Prayers for the Earth."People responded from the Philippines and from Nicaragua, from Iowa and from New York City. People we had never met searched through the Rig Vedas for us. Others made us aware of the profound reform going on in Hebrew and Christian liturgical traditions. They sent us their favorite poems and blessings. They thanked us. Unknowingly, they healed our despair.The beauty of the trees,the softness of the air,the fragrance of the grassspeaks to me.The summit of the mountain,the thunder of the sky,the rhythm of the sea,speaks to me....And my heart soars.These voices began to unfold a collective story. It is the story of women and men throughout history and prehistory seeking to align their spirit with the creative power that pervades the material world. It is the story of a common spiritual heritage we choose to call Earth Prayer. And it is based on one single recognition: we are, body and spirit, one with the Earth and with all of creation.Over and over again, the prayers in this book remind us of this universal marriage of matter and spirit. They call on us to rethink the dualism of our culture that separates the sacred and the secular, the natural and the supernatural, body and mind. They make it clear that we humans are not here simply as transients waiting for a ticket to somewhere else. The Earth itself is Christos, is Buddha, is Allah, is Gaia.In every religion we find the need to consecrate our participation in the natural world. This is especially evident in the tribal religions of native peoples. Their songs and prayers express a great courtesy toward the natural world. For example, the refrain "We return thanks"in the thanksgiving ritual of the Iroquois Indians -- first to our mother, the Earth which sustains us, then to the rivers and streams, to the bushes and trees, to the elements, and finally to the Great Spirit who directs all things -- reveals the intimacy of their relation with the entire Earth community.A similar sensitivity can be found in many other cultures. Chang Tsai, an eleventh-century administrative official in China, placed this inscription on his office wall so that he would always have it before him:Heaven is my father and earth my mother and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in its midst. That which extends throughout the universe, I regard as my body and that which directs the universe, I regard as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters and all things are my companion.The Christian liturgical calendar, though primarily concerned with celebrating historical events in the life of Jesus, also links us to the cycles of the seasons. Its great Advent and Easter liturgies invite us to pause and enter into these sacred moments of the Earth's story. Likewise, the disciples of Buddha, without considering the necessity of formal prayers, have always wished well for all creation: "May all beings be happy."And this is the ultimate in Earth Prayer, whether we call it prayer or not.In preparing this book we discovered that for many people today, it is not religious prayer at all, but poetry, that they turn to in their search for spiritual nourishment. Perhaps this is because so many conventional religious prayer books seem unable to consecrate the normal and the natural. Preoccupied with a world beyond this one, the revelatory power of the Earth goes unpraised.Poetry, however, is unhampered by this dualism of sacred and profane and is more free to reach for wholeness. Its mythic images and evocative words expand our awareness, enabling us to experience ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling other than our own. Seeing and feeling with this degree of sensitivity enables the leap of consciousness into Earth Prayer. Consequently, this book draws from a great volume of world poetry.Sometimes, when a bird cries out,Or the windused sweeps through a tree,Or a dog howls in a far off farm,I hold still and listen a long time.My world turns and goes back to the placeWhere, a thousand forgotten years ago,The bird and the blowing windWere like me, and were my brothers.My soul turns into a tree,And an animal, and a cloud bank.Then changed and odd it comes homeAnd asks me questions. What should I reply?Over time we both came to see that the essence of Earth Prayer lies not so much in the words we use -- be they poetic prayers or prayerful poems -- as in the concentrated attention we give to it. The moment of prayer is always an event. Something happens. An intention offers itself; a moment of concentration and expressed vision. Like yoga or meditation, Earth Prayer is a way to collect the wandering faculties of the mind. Through prayerful concentration we sense how we are a "spoken"as well as a "speaking"reality: a receiver; a listener. We listen to the world around us and allow the impressions made upon us by the outer world, and the expressions of our inner life, to flow into one another, to enhance and reflect each other.As we deepened our understanding of prayer, differences within the form became less important. The voices in this book address the "Lord,"the "Great Spirit,""Wakan Tanka,""Goddess"-- each acknowledging the spiritual precedents of their culture. Underlying these differences in salutation is the recognition that the transcendent is not separate from creation. The divine may be sacred, powerful, vulnerable, or fearsome, but it is always embodied and ultimately unnameable.Earth Prayer is a tradition with particular meaning for our time. Faced as we are now with the diminishing richness and vitality of life on Earth, we need to understand and re-experience our unity with the natural world. Fostering this transformation is the challenge and task of our generation. The beauty of Earth Prayer is that it reminds us that we are not alone in this task. In forest clearings, beneath star-filled skies, in cathedrals, and before the hearth, men and women have always given voice to this impulse. In these prayers of the Earth we join our voice with theirs to call forth the healing that is so needed.