AWAKENING AWE, BELONGING, AND SACRED RESPONSIBILITY

Reverence as a Way of Seeing

Restoring relationship in a living world

By Larry Greene — Navigating Our Future  

June 2026

Reverence begins

with a shift in perception.

Not something we add.

Something we remember.

In the modern world,

we are taught to see the Earth as object.

Resource.

Property.

Asset.

Something to use.

Something to manage.

Something to control.

But this way of seeing

is not neutral.

It shapes everything that follows.

When the world is seen as object,

relationship disappears.

And when relationship disappears,

extraction becomes normal.

We take

without asking.

We use

without noticing.

We measure value

without understanding meaning.

Reverence interrupts this.

It invites us

to see differently.

Not the world as object.

But the world as presence.

Alive.

Relational.

Participating in its own becoming.

A forest is not timber.

It is a living community.

A river is not water.

It is movement.

Memory.

Connection.

A salmon is not a resource.

It is a being.

Indigenous traditions

have long understood this.

Life is not made of things.

It is made of relationships.

Without reverence,

we reduce the world

to what it can give us.

With reverence,

we begin to ask different questions.

What does this place need?

What relationships sustain it?

What is my role within it?

This shift matters.

Because the crises we face

are failures of relationship.

Reverence is how we remember.

And from this place,

a different future becomes possible.

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