The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it's a brand new sun. It's born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day, and
in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say, "The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won't have wasted precious time." Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.
The highest level of prayer is not a prayer FOR anything. It is a deep and profound silence, in which we allow ourselves to be still and know God. In that silence, we are changed. We are calmed. We are illumined. Prayer is meant to dissolve the worldly focus, to dissolve our sense of a separate self, to help us detach from the noisy world order.
Prayer is like pouring hot water on an ice cube, melting the cold and encrusted thought forms that still surround our hearts.
