Yirah, the Awe That Refines (Twin Forces of Creation, Part III)
The Hebrew word for awe is yirah.
It is often translated as "fear," but that translation misses everything that matters. Yirah is what you feel standing at the edge of the ocean at night. It is the trembling that moves through you when you hold something precious and understand, in your body, how easily it could be lost. It is the recognition that you are in the presence of something vast, something that exceeds you, something that demands your full attention simply by existing.
I came to this word through my religious upbringing and through years of studying how humans experience the sacred. The encounters that change us are never comfortable. They humble us and attract us in the same breath. We want to move toward them. We also want to fall on our faces. This is not contradiction. This is the appropriate response to standing in the presence of something holy.
I have come to believe that this response extends beyond explicitly sacred encounters into every act of real creativity. When you make something that matters, you feel it: the wonder of participating in creation, and the weight of what that participation actually means.
The Weight of Making
When I held my daughter for the first time, I was staggered by what I had done.
I had made a person. I had known this intellectually for the duration of my pregnancy, but holding her weight against my chest made the reality of what I had done undeniable. She was here because I had called her into being. She existed because my body had taken what my husband and I offered and built someone entirely new—someone who had never existed before in all of human history and would never exist again. I had participated in the same creative act that made everything. The wonder of that settled into me like something holy.
And with the wonder came the weight. I had brought someone who held my whole heart into a world that had the power to break her. She would grow into her own opinions, her own wounds, her own choices. She would move through a world I could not control, could not make safe, could not protect her from forever. I had made her vulnerable to everything by making her at all.
Wonder and weight, inseparable. To create is to release something into a world that does not answer to you.
The Quality of Attention
When I am working from this place of awe, the quality of my attention changes.
Everything sharpens. I notice details I would otherwise miss. I can feel when something is almost right, when the word I chose is close but not quite, when the structure is holding but not singing. The work speaks to me more clearly because I am listening more carefully.
This is what reverence does. It slows you down. It makes you approach the work the way you would approach anything sacred—with care, with attention, with the understanding that what you are handling deserves more than your distracted effort. You do not rush through a cathedral. You do not skim a love letter. You do not treat carelessly the things that matter.
The same is true of the work you are building. When you understand what creation actually is—the calling forth of something that has never existed before—you cannot treat it casually. The awe will not let you.
The Audience as Sacred Trust
In the previous essay, I wrote about the four altars of love: the work, the audience, the future, yourself. Awe attends these same altars, but asks a different question.
Love asks: What do I want to give?
Awe asks: What does this deserve to receive?
Consider the audience. When I am building from love alone, I create what I want to create and trust that the love will translate. Sometimes it does. Often it does not. Love that ignores the audience is talking to itself.
Awe remembers that the audience is entrusting you with their attention. Attention is finite, precious, easily exhausted. When someone gives you their attention, they are giving you something that cannot be replaced. Minutes of their life they will never get back. Headspace they could have devoted to anything else.
That is a sacred transaction. Awe makes me approach it as such.
The Counterfeit
There is a counterfeit that wears the same clothes as awe.
It is called perfectionism. It speaks the language of standards, of quality, of not settling for less than the work deserves. It looks like reverence. From the inside, it even feels like reverence.
But perfectionism never lets you finish.
It moves the goalposts endlessly. It finds new flaws to fix once the old ones are addressed. It insists on conditions that never arrive, standards that keep shifting, a level of readiness that recedes the closer you get to it.
This is how you recognize the counterfeit: awe lets you ship. Perfectionism does not.
Awe says: This work matters. Approach it with care. Make it worthy. And when you have done that, when you have given your honest best effort, awe releases you. It lets you open your hands and offer what you have made.
Perfectionism says: This work matters. You cannot risk getting it wrong. Wait until you are certain. And certainty never comes, because perfectionism is not actually interested in the work. It is interested in protecting you from the vulnerability of being seen. It uses the language of standards to keep you invisible.
I have lost years to this counterfeit. Notebooks full of ideas that never became anything. Projects that were almost finished, almost ready, almost good enough. The almost was the tell. Awe does not keep you in almost. Awe brings you to completion.
The Test
I have a practice I use now when I am hesitating to release something.
I ask myself: am I protecting the work, or am I protecting myself? Is this revision making the work better, or just delaying the moment when I have to be seen?
And then I ask the harder questions: what happens in my life if I do not release this now? What happens in the world if I keep holding this work hostage?
Because the work is not just for me. It is an offering. And an offering that never leaves your hands is not an offering at all. It is a hoarded treasure, appreciating for no one, serving nothing, gathering dust while the people who need it keep searching.
If I can name a specific flaw and fix it, I fix it. That is awe working properly—reverence that sharpens perception and leads to action.
But if the hesitation is just a feeling of not good enough without an identifiable cause, then I know the counterfeit has crept in. It is trying to convince me that the work needs more time when what it actually needs is release.
This does not mean I ship carelessly. I have been refining. I have been revising. I have been holding the work with the care it deserves. At some point, the care has done its work, and continued holding is no longer care. It is hoarding.
The work will never be perfect. I will look back at it in a year and see things I could not see now. That is the nature of growth. I cannot skip to the version of myself who has learned from releasing this work. I have to become that person by releasing it.
Remaining Astonished
There is something else that awe asks of me.
It asks me to remain astonished.
The more you create, the more familiar the process becomes. The blank page is not quite as terrifying. The revision is not quite as daunting. You develop craft, and craft can become routine, and routine can deaden the wonder.
But the wonder is not optional. Without it, you are just making things. Producing content. Going through motions. The awe is what transforms craft into art, what elevates skilled execution into something that touches people, what makes the work worth doing in the first place.
I have to keep finding the wonder. I have to keep remembering that calling forth what does not exist is a form of participation in the same creative force that made everything. Every time I sit down to make something true, I am doing something that deserves my astonishment.
When I lose the wonder, I can feel it in the work. The work becomes competent and lifeless. Technically correct and emotionally empty. The way back is always the same: remember what I am actually doing. Remember that this is sacred. Let the awe return.
Reconnecting with Wonder
When I lose sight of the wonder, I have to reorient myself.
Sometimes I find it in the obvious places. A thunderstorm rolling in. The way the sky looks just before dawn. The natural world has a way of putting me back in my place, reminding me that I am small and the world is vast and that vastness is not a threat but an invitation.
Sometimes I find it closer. In my children, who are walking miracles I participated in making. In the mechanics of my own body—the fact that my heart has been beating without my conscious intervention for decades, that my eyes are translating light into meaning right now, that my thoughts can shift how I experience reality. The wonder is not somewhere else. It is here, in the ordinary things I have stopped seeing because I see them every day.
I journal about it sometimes. I sit in silence and let the recognition return. I ask myself what I would notice if I were encountering this day, this work, this moment for the first time.
The awe is not something I manufacture. It is something I return to. The world has always been staggering. I just forget, and then I see it again, and the seeing is its own kind of grace.
The Work That Lasts
The work that creates devotion, the work that people return to and recommend and defend—that work carries both forces. The people who make it love what they are building fiercely enough to keep building when it is hard. And they hold enough awe to approach it with care, to treat it as sacred even when no one is watching.
You are not meant to resolve this tension. You are meant to hold it.
Stay Curious,
