Where we are
Living into a presence of reverence
The beginning of this year might be showing you that your old ways (which have supported you so lovingly before) don’t work anymore. Lists of goals. Quarterly plans. Anything of resolution. Striving. Fix. Urgency.
This is not a year that begins with fiery gumption. The slow energies of these first weeks of January 2023 are a nudge (that may feel like an uncomfortable blockade) to listen and see and simply be where you are.
There is tremendous power in the holding of stillness. Be still for any stretch of time longer than your mind wants to stay and you will be gifted reels of thoughts and mounds of feelings. There is nothing to do with these. Any pain you feel is in your resistance to what you see.
You know this already. We all do.
This is a year to claim what we know. To integrate our wholeness into what we speak and how we step through our days.
This is where we are. And this is where we’re creating what comes next.
As I’ve sensed into the moment of this year, many words emerged as possibilities for play: Soft. Dissolve. Open. Connect. Truth.
These words have guided us as we “lived into” the past three years (whether embraced or resisted). And they are still here to support us—for us to fall back into their nourishment as needed. Yet, they don’t hold where we’re going.
We are softened. Dissolved. Opened. Connected. True. We only need to trust this and live forward from these states of being.
Another layer of words appeared for me, too: Emerge. Transform. Potentiate. Rupture. Spring.
There is building energy here. And this is what we’re doing now. We’re creating new systems, new languages, new frames, and new forms that benefit all beings.
Yet these words don’t show us how to build (and live into) what we’re creating. And the old ways of how we design, shift, and invent don’t work anymore.
We must see where we are. Where we are is unlike anything we’ve known in this lifetime.
I almost wrote: It’s hard to see things when we’re inside them.
This used to be true. But I can see that going forward, it’s the opposite. The more deeply we learn to expand inside where we are, the more we will see.
(On one level, I’ve been saying this for a long time… noticing what’s small as immense… finding something new inside something known… but I haven’t seen the whole of what I’ve been saying until now. Something fresh has emerged. This is the way of things going forward. We will all be able to see more of what we’ve been saying, who we’ve been growing into. And it’s breathtaking.)
This is why stillness is essential. Not as romance or in small meditation moments. Not something extra or as aspiration. Stillness is essential daily practice because it’s the foundation of our discernment. And discernment is everything right now.
This must be said again: Discernment is everything right now.
In this moment of recognition of what has dissolved and opened, where we are going in our transformation and emergence, and the possibilities for our collective building of a more beautiful world, one word has offered itself as a spacious and loving guide for this year: reverence.
And this is its poem.
So it is.
love+light, Melissa
Reverence is not a whisper
Come inside. Breathe. Don’t try.
Ladybugs and moonstones.
Footsteps and spiders.
You aren’t lost.
See what’s here, who you are—
all of it.
Follow the worm’s path.
This is sanctuary.
When you find it, you are home.
And we can begin.
It’s not too big or hard or complicated.
Reverence is
to be in the presence of a beetle
without lineage or summary.
Feel the loose, intricate webs
of light and distance—
go into the blur,
collapse between give and receive,
beginning and end.
There’s no separation.
It’s all soil, stardust,
the frequency of bones
holding us upright as water.
This is our blueprint
for creating,
for learning and farming and banking and health—
how and why we live together
now.
It’s all grown from how we see.
Our action is reverence.
This is the only thing on the list.
Go into your heart.
Ask to see from here,
and everything opens.
