What is sacred to you?
Today I am grateful for the sacredness that surrounds me. It is boundless. I am grateful for warm clothes and boots on a blustery morning with wind chills in the single digits. I appreciate a different routine on this Saturday morning.
With the darkness and some snow pretty much daily this week here, I will go for my run midday— in better light and hopefully on clearer trails and roads. That means a different pace to the first hours of this day. I sit here engaged in the sacred act of writing, enjoying a sacred cup of coffee, composing a post that will hopefully have readers looking at the sacred in their own lives too.
The word sacred has many meanings beyond religious. Here are some of the phrases and words that describe the sacred in our everyday lives: worthy of spiritual respect or devotion, inspiring awe or reverence, honored, cherished, worthy, esteemed, highly valued and important, blessed, admirable, good, protected.
“Cultivating the sacred” was the topic of our Rivertown Gratefulness Gathering on Wednesday evening. We each spent time writing our own list of what we hold sacred in our lives.
My list started with family, recovery, running, writing, health, marriage, and friends. As I kept going, one that made the list before I really even had a conscious thought about it was “my scars.” I have numerous ones from surgeries. Bilateral mastectomies left the largest scars, across my chest. A total hysterectomy with bilateral salpingo-oopherectomy more recently left much smaller scars on my lower abdomen.
I’ll have a new scar on my right forearm as an area heals from the minor surgery I had yesterday to remove basal sell carcinoma. Many of my scars and cancer, or the threat of cancer, go together. These scars are sacred, and I think they showed up subconsciously as I made my list the other night because they signify life and healing to me. Here are two posts from my previous “Habitual Gratitude” blog that delve deeper into the worthiness of the scars I carry: A Collection of Scars and 13 Years, 108 Days, 2 + 6 = 8.
Nature and the outdoors, in any and every season, are also easy places for me to find the sacred. Those quintillions of snowflakes I mentioned in my previous post leave artwork like none other. Clouds moving across the sky. The coming daylight beginning to show itself as I type this. Cherished moments and deep gratitude for my working senses, allowing me to take in the awe and beauty.
The eight billion of us on the planet currently are each sacred too. I will remember this when I inevitably encounter people I find myself judging or growing impatient with. Each of us is to be held in esteem, and seen. That thought alone deflates the judgy self-righteousness that can flare up in me.
Time is sacred too. What I choose to do with mine. What you choose to do with yours.
What is sacred to you? Start your own list today. Pick one thing from the list and honor it in new or renewed ways. Onward!
