Everyday Sacred
Within the Japanese Shinto tradition, the world is alive with spirit. Every stone, tree, stream — even things we might consider inanimate — is believed to carry a spirit called kami. Nothing is without significance; nothing is without life. What moves me deeply is that this belief is not unique to Shinto. We find it echoed across many ancient and indigenous spiritual traditions around the world — a shared understanding that the sacred isn’t reserved for temples or rituals alone, but is woven into the fabric of everyday existence.
I experience this same reverence whenever I spend time at one of the monasteries in the Plum Village Tradition of Engaged Buddhism. There, every act — entering a meditation hall, placing your shoes neatly outside the door, walking slowly across a garden path — becomes an expression of mindfulness and respect. We bow to the hall not out of habit or formality, but because we recognize the space as sacred. And by extension, we recognize that everything is sacred.
This is not just symbolic. It’s a mindset — a way of seeing that holds everything and everyone in dignity. It’s an invitation to awaken to what is already true: that spirit is present in the ordinary. That nothing is beneath our reverence.
And yet, in our high-speed, hyper-productive culture, this sacred way of seeing is often lost. We’ve become conditioned to see only utility and status — to prize what’s fast, loud, and new — while the slow, quiet, and humble is overlooked. Crass consumerism, endless ambition, and pop culture trends distract us from the sunlight falling through the blinds, the hush of trees in the afternoon breeze, or the softness of our own breath. When we forget the sacredness of the world around us, we also begin to forget the sacredness within ourselves.
This is part of why I’m drawn so deeply to contemplative photography. For me, it's a spiritual practice — a way of honoring what might otherwise go unnoticed. I love creating images that lift up the holiness of the ordinary: a chipped teacup, a shadow on the sidewalk, a wrinkled face, a dandelion in the cracks. Every subject is worthy of our full attention. Every object, every being, has presence — agency, even. In the lens of contemplative seeing, nothing is too small, too plain, or too broken to be beautiful.
We often draw lines between what’s “sacred” and what’s “secular,” as if one deserves our awe and the other does not. But life doesn’t work that way. Everything that we see, hear, touch, or feel has something to offer us — if we’re paying attention. As the Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa described it, this is the recognition of basic goodness: not goodness in contrast to badness, but goodness as the fundamental nature of reality itself — things just as they are.
This basic goodness is not something we have to earn. It is our birthright. It’s present in the color red, in the sound of birdsong, in the feeling of fresh air after a long day indoors. Trungpa writes:
“We are speaking here of the basic goodness of being alive — which does not depend on our accomplishments or fulfilling our desires. We experience glimpses of goodness all the time, but we often fail to acknowledge them.”
To see the world this way is to walk through life with reverence — not reserved for mountaintops or cathedrals, but for breakfast dishes, sidewalks, and the silence between words. It is to bow inwardly — again and again — to everything.
And in doing so, we return to something essential: we remember that everything, animate and inanimate, has spirit. And that we ourselves are not separate from that sacred wholeness.
