These days, gratitude practices have become extremely common. Many self-help books, therapy podcasts, mental health influencers and general practitioners recommend keeping a gratitude journal — The practice of writing out and reflecting on the things you’re happy to have in your life, the things you are grateful for. While this is a great practice, I can’t help but feel like we’re missing something here. There is a place for reverence — for finding things you can revere. Revering something opens a whole range of experiences because it reminds us that there are things greater than ourselves. Let's look at some instances of what it means to revere. To revere the sun, instead of being grateful for a sunny day — to acknowledge that the sun brings us life and warmth and bounty, is to me at least a much deeper emotion. It's a felt sense that there are powers in the world both hidden and in plain sight. To revere a holy site, regardless of your personal beliefs, to feel the energy of a place where people feel the veil between our world and that of another is at its thinnest. To revere a work of art, music or poetry or sculpture — These are things that are defined completely outside oneself, whereas gratefulness for them is always, in fact can only be, in **reference** to one’s self. When you start looking, you'll find there are many things you can revere. I started thinking about this when I read a wonderful collection of 39 pieces by Hermann Hesse called [About Trees: Reflections and Poems](https://historiesdrawingsprints.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/bacc88ume.pdf) > For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. > Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. Here, Hesse finds reverence in the working of a basic unit of nature -- the delicate balance of ecosystems, the sturdiness, in a deep sense the 'willpower' of a tree. To revere a tree, growing alone on a mountaintop somewhere, is to stare at the raw tenacity of nature itself. In our personal relationships too, I find there is a vast space for reverence. I'm lucky to have some friends in my life for which I feel a genuinely unbreakable bond. Similarly to have someone who really knows you, including your most negative aspects, and who receives them exactly as they do with the best parts of yourself. These are human qualities that transcend the individual, that speak to something about the human spirit. These days, we live in a largely secular world, with religion playing less and less of a major part of our lives. And whether or not that is good or bad, it definitely has left a gap in our ability to revere things. In fact, religion has reverence completely built-in: the history of our religious traditions provide a very clear framework for what should be revered -- a divine being, sacred texts, holy sites, etc. In fact you can probably make a good argument that God is literally defined as "that which you revere". Here's a thought: what if we understood the decline of reverence not just as a side effect of secularization, but in fact one of it's deepest losses? What if our capacity for reverence is actually a fundamental human need, one which religion has traditionally fulfilled but now needs to be cultivated in new ways? You could argue that without some kind of reverence in our lives, it's much easier to be left feeling adrift -- self-absorbed, rootless, hungry for meaning and unsure where to find it. The environmental crisis, for example -- might that be understood, in part, as a failure of reverence? A failure to revere the natural world that sustains us? Or think about the loneliness epidemic and the vast number of people who feel increasingly alienated in the world. Could the lack of reverence play a role here too -- our inability to see connection as a sacred good? I'm not saying that religion is the answer (though I am unsurprised by the neo-traditionalist movements appearing in what were once highly secular spaces, e.g. Silicon Valley). But I do think there is a real absence in the culture, an absence of practices and frameworks that nurture our capacity for awe, for humility, for a sense of the profound. Once I adopted this practice, I realized that a sense of wonder and awe are waiting for you almost everywhere you look. You learn to see and recognize that there are things in this world that are worthy of your deepest respect. It gives you a reliable method to step outside of yourself and connect with something greater. The mood of our culture is to be self-focused, self-promoting, self-loving, self-accepting, and self-assured. But revering things is inherently not about anything in reference to the self. So alongside your gratitude practice, I really recommend finding things you can revere. Look for those moments that make you feel small in the best possible way. Things that invite you to be humble, to be receptive, even to be silent. To practice reverence is to train your eye to see more deeply, more attentively, and to remember that part of your life's work is to honor all this beauty that surrounds you.