Blessed to Witness: From Earth to Its Maker

How blessed I am to have been alone long enough to meet myself.

And in meeting myself, to understand why my soul always leaned toward the land.

I came from an earth-based way of knowing—one rooted in soil and season, in sunrise and frost, in reverence for the living world. I learned to bow my head to the land, to listen to the wind, to mark the turning of the year. There was beauty in it. There was depth. There was care.

But there was also a quiet ache.

Something unnamed.

Something just beyond reach.

I loved creation deeply, yet I did not know Whom I was loving through it.

And then Islam entered my life—not as a rejection of that reverence, but as its unveiling.

The Qur’an did not ask me to stop looking at the world.

It asked me to look more clearly.

“In the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the alternation of night and day, are signs for people of understanding.”

“We will show them Our signs on the horizons and within themselves.”

What I once experienced as sacred moments—sunrise after the longest night, the hush of winter, the breath of the earth waking again—I now experience as āyāt, signs pointing beyond themselves.

Not objects of devotion, but messengers.

I am blessed to have known the world without its Creator, and then to know the Creator through the world.

To stand at dawn and watch the sun rise—not as something divine in itself, but as a servant in perfect obedience.

To witness the solstice and feel not mystery alone, but command.

Not worship, but recognition.

This is what was missing before.

Not meaning—but origin.

The yearning I carried in my bones was not for the earth alone. It was for the One who shaped it, sustained it, and entrusted it to us. Islam did not take my reverence away; it gave it direction.

Now, when I walk the land, I walk it as a witness.

When I observe the seasons, I observe His mercy in cycles.

When I feel small beneath the sky, I know exactly before Whom I am small.

Faith, I have learned, is not inherited noise or borrowed certainty. It is not found in endless commentary or polished voices competing to speak for God. Faith is encountered—in stillness, in honesty, in lived awareness.

“Do they not reflect within themselves?”

I reflect because I have been allowed to experience both absence and presence.

To know reverence without tawḥīd—and then to know tawḥīd filling every hollow place reverence could not reach.

How blessed I am to experience creation as creation.

And how infinitely more blessed to know its Creator.