Religion.

“It’s better to say a prayer before you eat,” my daughter said before dinner one night. We don’t pray in our home, so I asked her where she got that idea. “School,” she said. I didn’t know prayer was a part of her school day. I asked what the prayer is, and she folded her hands together and bowed her head, eyes closed. “God is great, God is good. Let us thank him for our food,” she recited.

**

A few months ago I came across a prayer tent set in the middle of campus. From outside of the folded-open flap of the white canopy, I could see written prayers dangling from strings inside and people standing in clusters, reflecting, or individuals kneeling, heads bowed. I felt longing.

**

My friend asks me what my thoughts are on God/spirituality, and I am stumped for a minute. My brain tugs at the strands of religion, tries to separate them from the concepts of God and the spirit. I come up with this: I think all people should feel connected to something greater than themselves so that they can cultivate gratefulness for their blessings. That comes to me most often when I am outside, staring up at the enveloping sky, looking down at the tiny bugs, holding hands with my lovely daughters.

Nature is my religion, I think. The universe is my “God.” Whatever that means.

**

Before school one morning, I ask my daughter if she knows why she prays at school. She says no. I ask her if she knows who the God is that she’s praying to. She says no, and stops bouncing around on my bed. She’s generally interested now.

“Some people think that God is the person who made everything in the world. They think he made the whole world: the dirt and the bugs and the snakes and the trees and the clouds and the sun and the whole sky. Even me and you. So when you pray, you are saying thank you to God for making your food.”

I watch her as she thinks that over. “But where is God?” she asks.

“Some people think he’s in the sky,” I tell her. “In a place called heaven.”

She’s silent, thinking. “No one has ever seen God, so some people don’t think he’s even real,” I tell her. “I don’t even know. So you’ll have to think for a long time about what you believe.”

My daughter laughs suddenly. “Noooo,” she says. “I think he’s in the clouds! He’s getting his head rained on!” She doubles over, laughing hysterically, and starts flopping around on the bed again.

There. I feel it tug, a sense of rightness, somewhere in her silly answer to a serious question, in her very simple and concrete view of what God could be. If I could break that simple response down into its essence, I think it could be a whole bible. The book of light, verses of joy.

Hearing nothing, everything.

It's easy in the bustling clashes of spring to see beauty everywhere. Green burgeons into yellow into blue sky, and everywhere there is the buzz of bugs and people going outside for the sake of it. Warmth that jostles the cells of your skin so that even you feel a certain burning. Life is blooming everywhere in all of its noisy, chaotic urgency. An obvious beauty.

It's easy to forget, then, how beautiful it is to walk in late fall. How simply necessary it is, how vital it feels to the soul. We walked yesterday just before the sun went down and it was chilly and gray and brown and still. The trees have been scraped nearly barren over the last few weeks, and where leaves remained on branches they were yellow and fragile, shivering in the wind. You can see for miles through the tress now and everything stands so certain, so solid and resolute.

If you stopped walking to listen, you would hear: nothing. Nothing except a cold endless sweep of sound in the distance, cars rushing down a nearby road, the lonely sound of a plane overhead, the tiny rustling of leaves from creatures burrowing deep against the cold.

The river, even. The swirls and eddies that I could swear make noise in the spring are eerily silent, slipping and overlapping in one long, continuous run over the top of the water. Little whirlpools appear here and there. We stopped to listen and heard: nothing. A long silence.

On the walk home we talked of poetry, and I told the girls about the Yehuda Amichai poem where he describes a woman whose skin is made of lizards, and all of them love the sun. We talked about the same poem, where the woman has the laughter of grapes, many round, green laughs. I asked the girls what that would sound like.

"Shaking," Madeleine says. "Like when they're in the trees and the wind blows them."

We're quiet as I contemplate that. It's a perspective I hadn't considered - I always think of when you eat grapes, how they feel in your mouth and how sweet they are when you bite them. I like her take here in this long, quiet cold - the poem feels sadder to me from her perspective, more grounded. I picture green grapes hanging from the vine, trembling in the wind, on the verge of falling. I feel grateful.

Dream little.

There's all this talk about the importance of dreaming big. I took a whole online class on the subject, in fact, and found it wonderfully inspiring. I just found a notebook for dreaming big - complete with three steps on how to get to the big dreams (I guess), and I was so lured by those gleaming words - "dream big" - that I felt that little buy it! click in my brain. It's the answer, my brain whispered at me. That's where your happiness is.

No. No no no no no.

I love the idea of dreaming big because I think it's important to inflate your concept of what is possible, to stretch the boundaries of possibility and explore them, and to take it further and step outside of them, just to see what happens when you do. That's where the excitement is, surely, and some would say the contentment is there, too.

But you can't live there.

Climb the shiny turrets as far as you can, take in the view from up there and appreciate the big picture for all it's worth. But don't live there.

I say: dream little. A dream is just a beautiful idea of what reality could be, and the thing is that a beautiful reality is always right in front of your face if you want it to be. Little is where you live. Little is what you are. Contentment is up there, but it's down here, too. It should be, anyway. Lift up a rock and look for it. Toss a pebble and watch it ripple across water. Feel it in the small hands of your children and the smell of coffee and butter melting on toast, in the sound of biting into an apple and the thump of your very own heart in your chest.

It takes time to build a home in the clouds, above the shiny turrets, just like it took time to build a home right where you are today. Who knows if the impossible is even attainable? Who cares? Take slow steps. Keep your eyes firmly ahead, even if you're climbing toward something. It's so easy to forget the beauty right in front of you if you're always reaching for something higher.