I’ve been having a bit of a hard time this week with a few things. Firstly, writing my own prayers has been more difficult than I anticipated. I think it’s because although I appreciate pre-written prayers (I think they’re beautiful), I’ve spent most of my life just saying prayers on the fly. As a child I would pray when I woke up, before meals, and before I went to bed, and most of them went something like this:

Hey God, thanks for being awesome. Thank you for all the good things in my life. Please don’t let me die in my sleep. Also, please keep all my family alive today because I really like them. Again, you’re awesome. Thank you. Amen.

I mean, it didn’t go exactly like that, but you get the general idea. Even our grace over meals was short and sweet:

God is Great, God is Good, let us thank Him for our food. Amen.

So it’s been difficult for me to get creative with these new prayers. I want them to be meaningful and I want the imagery to match my passion for Spirit, but I feel like my writings all end up falling flat. I want something that’s somewhere between personal and formal. I still pray in a very personal way, and I don’t want to stop doing that. But I want to add more structure to my prayer as well. That’s one of the reasons I love Judaism, because there are so many formal prayers and they really touch my heart. That’s why I light my candles on Shabbat.

I’m still shooting for five prayers by the 31st. So far I only have one, and it’s a Samhain prayer (because it’s never to early to start thinking about my favorite Sabbat of the year). If you have a chance, send some creative energy my way and I just might finish this challenge on time!