August 13, 2026
Awareness: Soul Medicine
by Reverend René
Last month, I invited us into a Summer of Awareness—to practice presence, to notice what we are thinking and feeling, and to become curious about what thoughts we are dropping, moment by moment, into the pool of awareness.
I've been practicing.
One of my practices has been listening to the sounds of summer.
For me, summer sounds like cicadas and crickets. I hear them wherever two or more trees are gathered! There is something about their collective song that immediately brings me into the present moment. I don't have to understand it or interpret it. I simply listen.
And when I do, something happens.
A feeling tone of peace begins to infuse my entire being.
The feeling is pure.
And the story my mind gives it has something to do with “Home.”
Perhaps this is part of what awareness offers us. Before we attach a story to an experience, there is simply the experience itself. A sensation. A sound. A breath. A feeling moving through us.
We don't have to make it mean anything.
We can simply behold it.
To behold is more than to look. It is to give ourselves fully to seeing—to allow ourselves to truly experience what is here.
I have been thinking about Mary Oliver's question from The Summer Day: What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Perhaps there is another question beneath the question of purpose:
What if, for this moment, I simply experience it?
What do I feel?
What is here?
Can I allow the feeling to move through me like a cloud moving across the sky—seen, felt, experienced, and allowed to pass without needing to create a story about it?
This, too, is awareness.
And perhaps this is where awareness becomes medicine.
We begin to discover that we are not required to believe every thought, follow every feeling, or turn every experience into a story about who we are. We can become the compassionate beholder of our own lives.
And then something extraordinary becomes possible.
We begin to notice beauty.
Perhaps beauty is the fabric of life itself. The light moving through the trees. The sound of crickets at dusk. A face we love. A stranger's kindness. The vastness of the sky. The extraordinary miracle of being here at all.
Human beings have this remarkable capacity to behold beauty—to stop, receive, and allow ourselves to be moved by what we encounter.
And perhaps beauty is a portal to unconditional Love.
Not the love we have to define.
Not the love we have to earn.
Not even the love we have to understand.
The ineffable Love that is simply here.
So perhaps this summer, our practice is very simple:
Just behold.
Behold the beauty wherever you are.
Let yourself be moved.
Let yourself experience.
Let Love be.
Not simply something you give or receive, but something you remember yourself to be—an aspect of the movement of the beauty of God, a member of Nature, a member of Life itself.
Necessary for the whole.
You are here.
You are alive.
You are part of this beautiful, mysterious, unfolding Life.
Just behold.
And let Love be what you are.
Beholder of Life and loving you,
Reverend René
~ Inspired by the Christ Consciousness within, Jeshua ben Joseph / The Way of the Heart, and the podcast by Zach Bush, “How Nature Shows Love”