When most people say “thoughts and prayers,” I believe they are abdicating responsibility for doing anything at all. They are relegating a particular sorrow or situation to something little more fleeting than a thought. It seems to me they aren’t even praying.

They have lost touch with the truly magical power of real prayer. Prayer that winds us to each other like a spell, prayer that initiates conversations with forces, visible and invisible, that join us in taking courageous miraculous action. If I am weaving prayers for two moons cycles for you (I do an ancient novena that wraps around two moons), I am looking each and every moment for what it is I am supposed to DO next to help manifest the answer to that prayer.

If I light a candle for you and sit in front of it and think about your situation and what is happening and listen, listen to my heart, I may have to stand up in a moment and DO SOMETHING.

Every morning I pray for the body of the earth. I invoke my ancestors, biologic and karmic. I call up the dead, the extinct, the vanished ones who know, who know what is coming and what is happening. I call upon my descendants and promise them that today, this day, I will remember them and know that they are looking back over their shoulders and remembering me. I pray to my living allies — the animals, the trees, the rivers and the mountains. Help me! Help us! Show us what to do.

I pray for the wetlands, the oceans, and the rivers. I pray for the soil and the fungi and the creatures who live in the dark and whir our world into being. I pray for our atmosphere. I pray in sorrow at what my people have done and are doing. I make a promise, standing before my mother the earth, my father the sun, to atone, to acknowledge, to heal, to help. I use old spells (aves and paters) and I know these are words my ancestral mothers used and they take time, they pull me into myself, into relationship.

Real prayer is power because real prayer initiates us into the company of the saints — all of the living and all of the dead woven together as one. We are not alone. We have the courage and the responsibility of knowing we are not alone.

I pray…but my prayers are spells, invocations, ceremonies, magic. They take time, they take my heart, they make me move.

Do those words scare you? It is only because they were driven into ignominy by men who feared the true power of prayer.

Pray with me. Let us pray and take action on behalf of our Mother.