When I hear praise, my body reacts before my mind. I flinch as if something sacred has been misdirected.
It arrives as an error in the order of things, like incense lit at the wrong shrine. Warm hands extend gratitude toward me and I feel compelled to redirect it, to point past my own outline and toward the vast intelligence that animates us all. I am only breathing starlight, I tell myself. A transient form, briefly illuminated. To accept praise feels, at first, like allowing reverence to settle where it does not belong.
I once believed that humility required disappearance. That to be aligned with the sacred I must remain unmarked by it. I cultivated a philosophy of vanishing, mistaking absence for purity. Gratitude, when offered, was something to be returned immediately to the source, never allowed to rest in me long enough to suggest authorship. In this way I protected the universe from my ego, and myself from the risk of being named.
But the universe is not offended by participation.
When Kris thanked me yesterday, I feel the familiar resistance rise. My name spoken as if it matters. As if my presence carried consequence. I reach for metaphysics to dissolve the moment. Fate. Timing. The divine choreography of chance. I want to become incidental again. A witness rather than a contributor.
Yet something in me hesitates.
I begin to sense that my refusal is not devotion, but fear. Praise is not merely affirmation. It is implication. To accept it is to accept that I am not neutral, that my attention alters trajectories, that my choices ripple outward. This realization unsettles me. I have lived as though influence were dangerous, as though being seen invited collapse. I learned early that attention creates expectation, and expectation creates the possibility of failure.
So I made myself small and called it wisdom.
The shift comes slowly, not as epiphany but as recognition. I see that humility is not erasure, but accuracy. To deny my impact is to deny reality. The sacred does not move without form. It requires bodies willing to be present, voices willing to speak, hands willing to hold what passes through them. When she calls me a vessel, the word lands with precision. Not owner. Not origin. A steward of motion. A participant trusted, briefly, with momentum.
Accepting praise, then, is not a claim to greatness. It is an acceptance of responsibility. It is acknowledging that I was there, awake, receptive, willing. That I did not interrupt the current or divert it away from fear.
I am learning to receive praise as one receives a blessing. Without grasping. Without deflection. Allowing it to pass through me and leave behind a trace of obligation and care. A reminder that being human does not disqualify me from the sacred.
Now, when praise arrives, the flinch still occurs. But I remain. I let it settle. I understand that reverence does not demand my disappearance. Breathing starlight does not absolve me of consequence. It situates me within it. Sometimes the altar is not a place to flee from, but a place to stand, and recognize that participation itself is the prayer.