Under Open Sky: Praying With Allah, Not Just To

I feel closer to Allah under the open sky than inside any mosque I’ve ever entered. This confession would shock my mother if she were alive to hear it, but sitting by the pond in my grandmother’s village, watching water reflect clouds and sky, I experience prayer without words, connection without ceremony.

Religious buildings are human constructions designed to inspire awe, but nature is the source of awe itself. Mosques and temples try to replicate the feeling of infinity through architecture and art, but forests and oceans actually are infinite in ways that dwarf human imagination.

In natural settings, spirituality feels discovered rather than prescribed. The reverence emerges organically from direct encounter with mystery—the incomprehensible complexity of ecosystems, the vast scales of geological time, the miracle of consciousness arising from earth and water and sunlight.

Religious buildings remind us that we should feel small before God. Nature makes us feel appropriately small without trying, without insistence, simply through the experience of standing beneath stars or beside ancient trees or at the edge of seas.

Prayer in mosques follows prescribed forms, familiar rhythms, communal practices. Prayer in nature happens spontaneously—gratitude arising unbidden, wonder flowing without effort, the sense of being part of something larger emerging naturally from the recognition that we actually are.

Perhaps this is because nature is the first revelation, the original sacred text written in the language of seasons and storms, growth and decay, birth and death. Religious buildings interpret this text through human symbols and human understanding. Nature lets us read it directly.

In the mosque, I pray to Allah. By the pond, I pray with Allah, feeling the presence not as something separate to be reached but as the very ground of existence itself, the intelligence that organizes water into clouds, seeds into trees, consciousness into this moment of recognition.

The deepest spiritual experiences often happen not in buildings designed for them, but in places where we remember we’re part of creation rather than separate from it, where the sacred reveals itself not through human interpretation but through direct encounter with the mystery of being alive.