Reverence, the Only Natural Response: We Have Simply Lost Our Way

It wasn't entirely our fault, surely. We honed our reverence-craft over thousands of years, across the scope of everything we knew and with the fury of a people who know who they were. We knew ourselves. Then our histories were taken from us, and so our futures became uncertain, and now we all just cope. It's all we can do as a people who are fed poisonous foods and poisonous ideas their whole lives. Poison rains down from the skies, crackles through the air, fills us up until we are ripe for coercion. Doesn't take much. Suddenly we lost our compass, we lost our torch in that darkness and the first fear of being disconnected from and forgotten by the Great Love became real, and everything they told you was important didn't help, couldn't absolve the guilt and banish the terrible barrow wights waiting there for us in the shadows. Because sooner or later they'll get us all—every one--and then whatever little spark we have now will be gone forever. It's enough to crush our real selves into tiny, secret places we all but forget exist. But the fear that stalks us, the fear of death is just the fear of not-love, which is really a cheap scare that breaks down and can't hold water in the face of the truth.

Truth is, that reality we were taught is made of lies. It's bullshit, it's a shoddy excuse for the real thing, and by revering life, we choose to instead Accept No Substitutes. For we are all love, all the time. No hurt could ever take that away. No deed should ever damn us beyond the ultimate redemption of our creation. We all seek the same thing; we all deserve the love that we seek.

To be reverent is to see the world for a moment with all the darkness cleared away, to find truth in the connectedness of that moment. That first fear that hounded us so, that chased us, hungered after the peace and the wellbeing of our families, that insidious disease whose mark we learned to dread in the lines it etched on the faces of our mothers and fathers, all that deep fear of losing and being lost...well that, it turns out, is nothing. Death was never the end. When we revere, we remember that fact. We take to heart our own immortality even as we see ourselves humbled by the grace of our being. Reverence is an always-beginning. It is ever-living, ever-faithful, ever-sure, as Rasta would say. It is our connection with Source. It is our gift, and our touchstone. It was instilled in us from the moment of our inception and it is what we truly are.

And it is always within our reach.