sacred.

We are what we honor.

SCOBY - Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria Yeast

I was twelve years old when someone gifted my parents a kombucha scoby. It looked like something slimy stuck to the underside of river rocks. I was fascinated. I brewed strong sweet tea, added the scoby, and checked on the fermentation every day. I served the tangy, fizzy outcome with ceremony every evening to my family and to any visitors who didn’t have the heart to refuse in fancy crystal goblets we had never used before.

Eventually the scoby grew thick and yellowed, a little scary looking. There weren’t enough jars in the house or shelves in the fridge to store the copious amounts of kombucha I had already made. I was tired of my fleeting hobby and asked my parents if I could just throw the scoby away.

The scoby was a gift, they reminded me. It was alive. A generous creature that transformed a simple tea into an elixir said to grant longevity. It is sacred. We had to treat it with respect. So one evening, we wrapped it in a cloth, dug a hole in the backyard, and buried it with a tenderness usually reserved for a beloved pet.

There were other sacred things in the home I grew up in. My grandmother’s altar, with her brass and silver idols of gods and goddesses. My mother’s wedding saree. A deep resplendent red, threaded with intricate gold patterns, tucked away with reverence. My dad’s meticulously organized closet, always smelling faintly of Old Spice.

The word sacred now sounds old-fashioned. It’s a remnant of a slower world. One where the sky and the body were still a mystery. Where the vows of marriage were inviolable. Where birth, death, and grief were shrouded in ritual.

I don’t romanticize that past. I don’t want to return to a time when jealous gods and rigid honor codes dictated what should be revered and how. I’ve shed the burdens of conformity and the dogma of organized religion gladly. Like many of us, I choose my community based on shared interests and values. I value my freedom and autonomy – things my ancestors, especially the women, couldn’t even conceive of.

But something is missing.

In shedding the rituals and dogmas that once defined human lives, we’ve also lost the coordinates that helped us locate ourselves in the world.

We have removed the gods, the rigidity of sexual purity and obligation in relationships, the sense of duty to a tribe or a nation. In their place is a gaping absence of meaning – one we are now expected to fill with a choose-your-own-adventure purpose that might take decades to find, or never arrive at all.

If we don’t have the inclination or the luxury for deep psychological excavation, the pursuit of money and status keeps us distracted. We have more prosperity and peace than most generations before us. And yet mental health is plummeting. There is a sense of being unmoored, lost, without purpose.

These are not personal failings. These are symptoms of operating within a culture with no center of gravity.

For too long, humans relied on inherited symbols and myths to bring structure to our inner lives. Many of them began as reminders that some things are more than they appear. But over time, they became prisons. They told us what to revere, how to live, who we were allowed to be.

Now we are dismantling that scaffolding: the dogma, the patriarchy, the rigid roles, the exclusion, the control. What’s left behind is freedom – yes – but also disorientation.

We have no common compass. No shared sacred ground. No community beyond those we reach through screens that flatten nuance and often fan the flames of otherness.

Everything is functional and disposable. Everything can be optimized, hacked and monetized. Even our grief, our joy, our creativity are packaged into SEO-optimized offerings at the altar of our ego.

And that is a special kind of hell: custom-built, self-reinforcing, and deeply isolating.

I think we are hungry for sacredness.

More than religion or ideology. Something elemental. A shared compass that points to something infinite. A reminder that we are part of a larger, interwoven web. That this life is not just something to maximize, but something to kneel before, in awe.

We’re trying.

With astrology and personality frameworks. With politics and plant medicine. With dialects of New Age spirituality and self-help books. Each of us reaching, in our own way, for something sacred again.

The optimist in me wants to believe that this disorientation is not collapse, but a necessary reckoning. A kind of developmental lag, as we come untethered from the identities and systems that once told us who we were.

Our nervous systems haven’t caught up to the expansion of our awareness.

Maybe we are not breaking down, but breaking open.

Maybe we are shedding outdated scripts and slowly building the emotional and societal architecture to live with more ambiguity, more freedom, more responsibility.

Maybe we are not lost. Maybe we are evolving.

I have found that I am incapable of giving myself over to any one system. I’ve read too much. Traveled too far from home. Peered into minds that are so different from mine and yet, essentially the same. I know how easily an anchor can become the weight that drags us down. How capable we are of self-delusion.

There is only one truth I trust completely: nothing is certain. Not even the Self. It is always shifting, reshaped by experience, flowing through time like water.

Life is what it is. It will not be what we want it to be. So we have to flow with it. And that is both our gift and our despair.

So this is what I worship: Seeking. Presence. Conscious transformation. A life lived as close to reality as I can bear it.

And still, I need magic. I need alchemy. I need some portal to the divine. Like the scoby from my childhood, I need reminders that stillness holds motion. That decay carries the seed of renewal. That even in the dark, transformation is possible.

So I make candles and whisper quiet spells into them before gifting them to the people I love. I craft new moon intentions and full moon reorientations. I ask for signs from departed ancestors. Not with faith or certainty, but with reverent hope. I write. To hear myself. To meet what comes through me from beyond me.

I pause. I notice the surprises and mystery folded into the absurdity of ordinary life. The first sip of coffee. My daughter’s laughter. My husband’s hilariously terrible jokes.

My experience of life is sacred.

Not because it’s extraordinary. But because it’s mine. And because I choose to treat it that way.

Even the most mundane moments — when tended to — become portals. Little altars to awe. Evidence that the divine is not elsewhere, but here.

The sacred is not eternal and unchanging.

The sacred is fleeting. The sacred is becoming.

It is we who are sacred as we live through the world.

We are always fermenting — slowly, invisibly — into something new.