I am confident that almost everyone will understand the importance of focus and attention when it comes to prayer. This next suggestion may not appear to be such an obvious aid to everyone, yet it is so important that none should neglect to try its merits.

If you believe as I believe that we live in a space between two different worlds; that of the spirit and that of the material kingdoms, and if you would learn of this space in order to understand both worlds, then you might agree that the understanding of the one without the other is not satisfactory. There are those who simply will not acknowledge a Spiritual World at all. These live strictly for material things and they are in danger of losing touch with some wonderful qualities of life, such as generosity, and the pursuit of beauty for its own sake rather than for the monetary value of beauty.

There are others who deny the value of anything material. The only thing of value to these folks are the Spiritual pursuits. The love of money is the root of all evil and to these the balance contained in the space between the worlds is just as imperfect as it is with the materialists. We have a physical body. We could spend many hours learning about it, studying it. Even this material body contains evidence of divine wisdom.

Within our material body, lies a wonderful creation that works well for us all. Even those who are broken and bent and unable to do the normal things that most of us can do, are still unbelievably well put together. The eyes alone are so marvelous as to defy description and if we are missing those, our ears are nearly as wonderful!

One of the great teachers of our world has pointed out how the two shapes, the sphere and the column, are contained in opposite poles within our body. The head is nearly spherical and at the pole the legs are nearly columnar. At the head, the bone is practically on the outside with a mere trace of skin covering it, while at the legs, the bone is completely inside and the flesh is thick around it. In between the chest, with the ribs that start out close together and round resembling the head in a way, and at the bottom of the chest the ribs are spread apart; the bony parts can not be left from the outside as they work inwardly toward becoming more like the bones of the legs.

The head is the seeming seat of the thought process, the limbs propel us forward, enabling us to achieve our goals, and are tools of our will-power and, in between are the heart, the longs and the digestive system. A bridge between these two extremes keeps them both functioning, is found in the chest area, and the ancients believed that the area of the heart was the seat of our life of feelings and of our emotions. Certainly, there are those, who upon hearing of some unbearable tragedy, have felt their heart skip a beat or even stop all together.

This body then, can be seen as a living work of art. And, as we notice its beauty, we are also put in touch with what the Greeks discovered about proportions. To them, it was obvious that the balance seen in squares was sturdy but hot as beautiful as the balance seen in certain rectangles. It is obvious that as we glance around at the room in which you are reading this, you will see that the room is very likely a rectangle, rather than a square.

The Greeks found that the prettiest of these rectangles was easy to reproduce if they multiplied the longest side by .62 and used that result for the length of the shorter side. They called this the Golden Section. They built their buildings using it, and they soon discovered that the entire human body followed the same proportion!

If you will simply notice your left hand for a moment, you will see the proportion. Notice your palm and fingers. Notice that your palm is slightly longer than your finger lengths. In other words, your left had is not ½ palm and ½ fingers. Your fingers are approximately the length of your palm x .62 and you will arrive at the line of your first knuckle. And so forth.

All of this is simply to illustrate to my reader the beauty and the wonder of our bodies. We can not afford to dismiss our body as something that is less wonderful than our spiritual nature. Yet, there are those who worship the body. Every muscle and each hair must be exactly tight! The vanity of such is best avoided. "Nothing in the extreme." I believe those where Socrates' words. Neither the extremely devout nor the extremely atheistic are in balance. Here is this space between the two very real worlds.

Now all it takes is the desire and the strength to notice the beauty in the world around us. Using Agassiz' suggestion, we need only take a pencil and a piece of paper and go out to the nearest tree and look at the leaves, the bark, the shape and size of it; recording things we notice about it. Perhaps we might even draw what we see.

Our plan is to try to become aware of the world around us. We may take a different tree tomorrow. We may begin to learn to identify the trees in our part of the country. We might prefer to look at flowers; or we might enjoy really learning to garden using the mulch and compost methods! We will attempt to learn something of whatever interests us singly or in groups, not great feats of learning, just simple, gentle things that develop our appreciation for the outer world.

If we are unable to find anything in the outer world that interests us enough to learn some few facts regarding it, then we are as good as dead.

If we can not delve into some of the wonders of the outer world; the world that is there for the senses to examine, where sight and smell and touch and taste and sound exist so we might use them all to examine the world around us; then how will we be able to examine the inner world at all? If we are not interested in learning to hear the songs of the sparrows and the birds around us, then what is all this interest in learning to hear the inner voice of God? For in truth, God's voice is heard in the music of the tiny sparrow as well as in the stillness of our own inner tranquility.
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