I’ve been listening to The Others, a book that has stirred some of my deepest questions about consciousness, existence, and our place in the universe. What has stayed with me most is not the possibility of what lies beyond our understanding, but how little attention we sometimes give to the extraordinary world already before us. I find myself increasingly drawn toward a life shaped by reverence – not necessarily reverence for anything divine, but for the profound mystery and inherent worth of existence itself. And I worry that, in our pursuit of progress, we may be losing not only the natural wonders around us, but our capacity to recognize them as wonders at all. This poem grew from those thoughts.

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The season was ending
when I found the bumblebee,
its small body surrendering
to the cold.

I lifted it gently,
laid it upon a fallen leaf,
red as the last warmth of autumn,
and tucked it beneath a bush
where the wind might not find it.

There was nothing to be saved.
Only a life to be regarded
with tenderness
as it passed from the world.

I have come to believe
there is something sacred
in the act of noticing.

The pale interior of a broken eggshell.
Sand clinging to the underside
of a gull’s discarded feather.
The ancient face of a sleeping man
who, for a moment,
looks like someone’s little boy.

A spider mending its web
after the violence of a storm.
The blue rivers beneath
the translucent skin of an aging hand.

A seed splitting open
in the absolute darkness of the earth,
beginning its astonishing work
with no one there to witness.

And beyond these small astonishments,
the immense and unknowable—

stars burning in the darkness,
light traveling unimaginable distances
to fall upon our upturned faces.

How extraordinary
to be alive at all.
To inhabit a body
capable of tenderness,
of desire,
of grief so deep
it seems the earth itself
must surely feel its weight.

And still,
to love the earth.

To love it knowing
nothing here is ours to keep.

But something is happening to us.

We are learning the price of everything
and forgetting how to recognize its worth.

Forests become timber.
Rivers become resources.
The living earth is measured
by what can be taken from it.

Even wonder is hurried along,
reduced to an image,
a moment captured
before it has been fully lived.

I fear the poverty of a world
that no longer knows
how to be astonished.

I fear what becomes possible
when nothing is held sacred.

For there is a difference
between accepting the passing of a life
and consenting to its destruction.

Reverence is not always quiet.

Sometimes it rises fierce,
a refusal,
a voice lifted against the ruin
of what cannot be replaced.

Sometimes it is grief.
Sometimes anger.
Sometimes the wild, unreasonable joy
of belonging to this world
for however brief a time.

And sometimes
it is no larger than two hands
cupped around a dying bee.

I cannot hold back winter.
I cannot ask the stars
to reveal their mysteries.
I cannot keep the things I love
from passing.

But I can live
as though their existence matters.

I can bend toward the smallest life.
I can stand beneath the heavens
and allow myself to be undone
by their immensity.

I can refuse
to let familiarity
make the miraculous ordinary.

And when the world asks
what all this tenderness is worth,

I can offer no answer
except the red leaf,
the shelter of the bush,
and the small, fading life
I could not save

but would not leave
unloved.