“To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention— on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God— that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying….” —W. H. Auden

I float in a dinghy in the serene river’s majestic flow. Wrinkles of light and water lift me without effort on a blue ribbon curling through the wide valley of green furrows. I immerse myself in something inhumanly complex, simplified by whoever or whatever made it, in order to allow me to speak of it. Perhaps the river is God, made entirely of water.

Surely, the river is time. Its currents swirl into eddies, reverse themselves, and settle into pools that turn stagnant—like time seems to do, like the way most of us are continually trying to get a grip on our lives—start that diet and exercise program, begin to save for the future, enroll in a language class, learn the names of all the composite flowers. And yet, for most of us, no sooner do we begin than we fall back as surely as if a hand pulled on our shoulders. We could learn from the river. It makes a clean break from the shore, and its journey has begun.