“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” – W. Berry

I don’t know what it is lately, but something in me has changed. Maybe it’s the slow return to life after years of illness, the months spent in a dark room, the aching loneliness of being mostly horizontal, the quiet brutality of a body no longer able to participate in the world. Maybe it’s that long stillness that has made the return so vivid, so astonished.

Now, it feels as though the world has been rinsed clean, as if I’m seeing with fresh eyes, tuned to a deeper frequency of beauty and presence. It’s as if the spirit of the San Pedro plant, that gentle teacher of openness and reverence, has made a home in my eyes, reminding to behold the world with awe and tenderness. Leaves are greener, vibrant in a way that feels newly revealed. Flowers reveal intricacies I must have missed before, the tiny veins in petals, the way a bee tucks itself into pollen like a prayer. Light, too, has changed. It plays off the natural world like it knows it’s being watched, casting golden laughter through trees, slipping into rooms like a blessing. It’s quite fantastical, and I hope it doesn’t dissipate.

Don’t get me wrong, I still crave the spectacular. The vastness of mountain edges, the Zen like tranquility of retreat centres, standing on the edge of the Okavango Delta staring into wildness. There is something undoubtedly divine in those places. But lately, it’s the ordinary that moves me. A cup of tea steaming in morning light. A stranger’s gentle smile in a queue. These moments arrive like soft revelations. The sacred is here. Not far away. Not later. Now.

Earlier today, I was watching an interview with Zach Bush, and he spoke about the lessons of nature. He referenced Wendell Berry, and that sentence came: “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” It stayed with me all day. I knew I had to write.

These words don’t just challenge how we look at the world, they ask us to slow down and see again. To choose reverence over rush. To honour what is here, already glowing beneath our gaze. What Berry is inviting us to realise is that sacredness is not something reserved for mountaintops or temples, it exists everywhere. Every forest, every street corner, every kitchen table is already holy. The only difference lies in our perception, in how we treat what is before us. A place becomes desecrated not because it lacks holiness, but because we forget to see it as sacred. Berry reminds us that the divine isn’t absent, it’s simply overlooked. His words call us back to relationship, to remembrance, and to the quiet act of seeing with reverence what we might otherwise pass by.

How to Be a Poet (to remind myself) by Wendell Berry

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.”

Zach Bush has a way of speaking that bridges science and soul. He reminds us that soil is not dirt, it is alive, relational, a teeming cosmos beneath our feet. He speaks of health as a symphony, not a machine. He suggests that when we do not recognise the sacredness of the space we are in, we desecrate it, not out of malice, but out of forgetfulness. Rooted in the modern blindness to what is right in front of us. His words echoed my own quiet humble epiphany: reverence is not reserved for the rare and extraordinary. It is an orientation. A way of seeing.

Thomas Merton, the Christian mystic and monk, once wrote about the “hidden wholeness” that exists in all things. In New Seeds of Contemplation, he speaks of a divine presence not waiting at the top of some spiritual ladder but humming through the ordinary. He found God in silence, yes but also in the unremarkable, in street corners and shadows. Merton believed that to become truly contemplative was to awaken to the divine within all things not through withdrawal, but through presence. He wrote that the world is transparent with God if we only learn how to see, meaning that the divine is not hidden behind the world, but within it. If we allow ourselves to truly see, with the eyes of the heart, the sacred begins to shine through everything, a leaf, a shadow, the curve of a smile. For Merton, this kind of seeing wasn’t about vision, but about perception, a contemplative attunement to the holiness already woven into the fabric of life. For Merton a bird’s flight, or the stillness of dusk were not metaphors for holiness, they were holiness itself, undisguised. The sacred, in his eyes, was not something to grasp but something to be received, gently, like a whisper or a kiss of wind. He knew that the sacred is not always loud. Sometimes it is found in the silence between two heartbeats or the pause before a sigh.

Thich Nhat Hanh called this quality interbeing, the sacred interconnection of all life. In simple terms, it means that nothing exists by itself, everything is connected to everything else. A cloud becomes rain, which nourishes a tree, which offers us fruit or shelter. You and I are not separate from nature or from one another, we ‘inter-are.’ When we understand interbeing, we see that to harm one part of life is to harm the whole. And to care for even a small part is to honour the vast web that sustains us all. He spoke with a kind of reverent simplicity that made even the most ordinary moments feel illuminated. To him, mindfulness was not just a practice, but a doorway, a way to return, again and again, to the sacred that lives in the now. He taught that with full attention could become a moment of communion, a way to care for the world by being fully in it. As he once said, “Wash the dishes as if you are washing the baby Buddha.” Each act of awareness, he believed, was a thread weaving us back into the web of life. As Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.”

And then there’s Mary Oliver, the poet who turned attention into devotion. Her poems invite us to fall in love with the natural world not through abstraction, but through intimacy. She writes of wild geese and blackberries, of dogs, ponds, and the shimmer of morning, ordinary things that, in her eyes, become sacred through the act of noticing. Her line, ‘Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.’ has become a kind of mantra for those walking the path of reverent presence. In poems like The Summer Day, she doesn’t just describe beauty, she dwells in it, asks us to pause with her in awe, and to consider our place within the wonder. Through her gaze, the world becomes an ever-offering gift. Her work reminds us that reverence begins with wonder, and wonder begins with presence. Her poems are a liturgy of the overlooked, a call to reverence for the unnoticed and the small.

The Summer Day is both a prayer and a wake-up call, a soft insistence to witness life in its shimmering immediacy:

“Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

Each of these voices, Berry, Merton, Hanh, Oliver, Bush, are pointing in the same direction. Not away, but toward. Toward presence. Toward relationship. Toward a sacredness that doesn’t ask us to escape our lives but to return to them more fully.

And perhaps that is the awakening I find myself inside of now. After illness. After forgetting. After so many days of darkness. It is not a grand epiphany, but a series of small ones. It’s the sudden joy of noticing the way water glides over stones in a quiet stream, the sunlight catching its surface like scattered jewels. That the wind sounds like song. That breath, once hard-won, is now a quiet gift. Reverence, I am learning, is not a posture. It is a way of seeing.

The sacred is not elsewhere. It is already here.

When we cultivate reverence truly learn to see with the eyes of presence something shifts. In the individual, it softens the heart, calms the nervous system and restores a sense of belonging. In the collective, it fosters empathy, deepens connection and encourages a more conscious way of being with one another. And in our relationship with nature, reverence becomes a bridge back to kinship a reminder that the Earth is not a resource to be used, but a sacred relative to be cherished. In this way, reverence is not only a spiritual path, but a healing one. For ourselves, for our communities and for the living world that holds us all.