To pray is not to use special language; it is the sound of a cry or a laugh rising from ordinary days. Formal or official words can often be lifeless. To pray we need to return like children to an elemental language of soul, to something close to song, to chant, to playground singing.
Observing the rhythms of nature and recurring cycles of the year, Henry Beston describes what he calls the "pilgrimages of the sun" across the sky, and at night, strolling the beach, "the dust of the stars" that fill "the night sky in all its divinity of beauty." For a moment of night, we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars--pilgrims of mortality voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. Nature is a part of our humanity and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery we cease to be human.