“A person should go out to the fields to pray. All the grasses will join you. They will enter your prayers and give you strength to sing praises to God.” - Nachman of Breslov
Like other Jewish mystics, Nachman understood that nature is infused with the divine presence. Most of us have at some point found ourselves gazing at a sunset, ocean or mountain and been moved to awe. The grandeur and beauty of nature can stop us in our tracks and give us a sense that we are standing in the presence of something greater than ourselves.
That feeling of awe and wonder can be a powerful portal to God. “To be spiritual,” the great theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “is to be amazed.”
There is a very simple Jewish way of acknowledging and cultivating the wonder that the natural world awakens in us: the practice of blessing natural phenomena. Some of these blessings are said as we consume the natural world, as when we bless the food we eat. Others invite us simply to meditate on the beauty or awe-inspiring quality of the natural world.
Both types of blessings make us conscious of our gratitude for all that we have and are. And they remind us that we are not separate from nature. We consume it and appreciate it at the same time as we are it.
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