Existence itself is utterance.
Existence itself is utterance. Not just the obvious voices - birdsong, wind, human speech - but the silent expressions: how moss grows toward moisture, how stones hold heat then release it, how grief moves through a body like water through soil. The Original People knew that everything is constantly speaking its nature. Even silence is expression. Even stillness streams.
In grief, the self disperses like seed. In reverence, we call our fragments home. But it's collective too - "let's" makes this a communal act. The Original People understood that individual consciousness is fiction; we are already gathered in the web of relations, but ceremony makes us remember this.
Deep reverence means following the thread down through surface appearance into the place where all things share the same root system. It's the pause before picking medicine plants, the acknowledgment that taking life to sustain life carries weight that must be felt, not dismissed.
Everything is alive, but colonial language forgot this. "Our world" isn't ownership but membership. "Our time" acknowledges that we are temporary trustees of an ongoing ceremony. The Original People knew time as spiral, not line - ancestors and descendants existing simultaneously in each present moment.
We ask all expressions of life to witness themselves being witnessed - a reciprocal seeing that creates sacred space where grief can be held without being fixed or solved.
