Dear Shree Maa

[Guest guest]

Holy Mother of us all,

 

Thank you.

 

Thank you for life and awareness of this world, for emotions and

sensory input. Thank you for humans being and for bonds of family and

humanity. Thank you for plants and animals, rocks and trees, sky and

ocean and rivers and stars. Thank you for birth and death, for light

and shadows, for things learned and things not yet learned. Thank you

for languages and cultures, for food and drinks, for work and play.

Thank you for the incredible diversity you build into each moment of

each day in our world.

 

Thank you for caring and compassion, for tenderness and gentleness,

for passion and anger, for ego and inner peace. Thank you for

gratitude and selfishness, for greed and generosity, for war and

fellowship. Thank you for the gods and goddesses, for bhajans and

homas, for prayers and chants, for speech and thought and knowledge

and wisdom and scriptures and gurus and children and devotion. Thank

you for humor and drama, for trials and afflictions, for impatience

and sorrow, for fingers and toes and opposable thumbs.

 

Thank you for opening your immense heart to love all the world, and

thank you for putting us here in that world of your love. Thank you

for the experience of your pure love that lifts the recipient above

the fray and puts a song in the heart and on the lips. Thank you for

the examples of pure love that we can see all around us if we just

take a moment and look for it. Thank you for love, romantic and

filial, mushy and silly, nurturing and respectful, considerate and

kind.

 

Thank you for the privilege of knowing you in this life.

 

Offered with love from your son,

 

Rick

 

 

Let my every word be a prayer to Her,

Every movement of my hands a ritual gesture to Her,

Every step I take a circumambulation of Her image,

Every morsel I eat a rite of sacrifice to Her,

Every time I lay down a prostration at Her feet;

Every act of personal pleasure and all else that I do,

Let it all be a form of worshiping Her.

Adapted from Verse 27 of Shri Aadi Shankara's Saundaryalahari