Poems & Prayers
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Academy Award–winning actor and author of Greenlights comes an inspiring, faith-filled, and often hilarious collection of personal poetry and prayers about navigating the rodeo of life and chasing down the original dream, belief.
My prayers are my poems are my prayers.
I’ve always relied on logic to make sense of myself and the world.
A prescriptionist at heart, I’ve always looked to reason to find the rhyme, the practical to get to the mystical, the choreography to find the dance, the proof to get to the truth, and reality to get to the dream.
I’ve been finding that tougher to do lately. It’s more than hard to know what to believe in; it’s hard to believe.
But I don’t want to quit believing, and I don’t want to stop believing in . . . humanity, you, myself, our potential.
I think it’s time for us to flip the script on what’s historically been our means of making sense, and instead open our aperture to enchantment and look to faith, belief, and dreams for our reality.
Let’s sing more than we might make sense, believe in more than the world can conclude, get more impressed with the wow instead of the how, let inspiration interrupt our appointments, dream our way to reality, serve some soul food to our hungry heads, put proof on the shelf for a season, and rhyme our way to reason.
Forget logic, certainty, owning, or making a start-up company of it; let’s go beyond what we can merely imagine, and believe, in the poetry of life.
My prayers are my poems are my prayers.
I’ve always relied on logic to make sense of myself and the world.
A prescriptionist at heart, I’ve always looked to reason to find the rhyme, the practical to get to the mystical, the choreography to find the dance, the proof to get to the truth, and reality to get to the dream.
I’ve been finding that tougher to do lately. It’s more than hard to know what to believe in; it’s hard to believe.
But I don’t want to quit believing, and I don’t want to stop believing in . . . humanity, you, myself, our potential.
I think it’s time for us to flip the script on what’s historically been our means of making sense, and instead open our aperture to enchantment and look to faith, belief, and dreams for our reality.
Let’s sing more than we might make sense, believe in more than the world can conclude, get more impressed with the wow instead of the how, let inspiration interrupt our appointments, dream our way to reality, serve some soul food to our hungry heads, put proof on the shelf for a season, and rhyme our way to reason.
Forget logic, certainty, owning, or making a start-up company of it; let’s go beyond what we can merely imagine, and believe, in the poetry of life.
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Community Reviews
Matthew McConaughey is the twenty-first century Solomon (aka Solo Man) and Poems & Prayers is a contemporary rendering of the book of Proverbs. I loved McConaughey’s definition: proverbs are “mantras and precepts that often require an intentionally curious interpretation, allowing us to make them our own. And while proverbs may not rhyme in word, they sure do rhyme in reason.”
“Proverbs are also spiritual math equations of cause and effect based on observations and life experiences…Proverbs inherently admit that we believe there was an author of Order behind Creation. They acknowledge that what we do in this life matters while we’re here, and at the same time they accept that what we do in this life has to do with what happens to us in the next.”
This world is “the spiritual gym where You exorcise my corrections…May I align my mind, mouth, and sight, as the spirit thinks, speaks, and sees…Today, give me the heart to know what feels right, the mind to argue if it doesn’t, and the gut to decide what to do from there.” And when I find myself singing along with Britney,
Oops I did it again
Spilled the tea
Of gossip and sin
When I’m tempted to say something I’ll later regret,
God grant me the courage to shut the f*** up instead.
Until then, I’ll go back to bed and I won’t come out of my room
“until I’m ready to see the roses in the vase instead of the dust on the table!”
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