It was you who taught us that the best way to pray was to make something beautiful.

But beauty, you see, is a dangerous, breathless thing. It is not a decoration; it is an interrogation. Today, when we pray, we do not kneel in the traditional sense. Instead, we sit down before the heavy, silent weight of the world and arrange whatever happens to be in front of us—a broken glass, a spilled shadow, a sudden memory—into patterns, forms, and feelings. We search for the structure of what cannot be seen.

We draw in the dust, knowing the wind will take it, and in that vanishing, we find a terrible peace. We take a picture to freeze a second that was already dying. We sing until our throats ache with the mystery of sound. We cook, mixing life into life, feeding a hunger that isn’t just in the stomach, but deeper, in the soul. We write a sentence. It feels incomplete, a gasp in the dark. So, we write another one.

We create. And through creating, we commit the sacred sin of trying to touch the untouchable. We pray.

“To create isn’t just an act,” you once whispered, or perhaps it was the silence inside us that spoke. “It is a state of being.”

This, you said, is why all life is beautiful. Not because it is perfect—oh, it is far from perfect—but because it exists so fiercely. To live, to simply breathe and try to give a shape to the chaos, is the greatest prayer of all.

It is the wordless hum of the universe, recognizing itself in the dark.

© Beatriz Esmer