Reverence can quietly become self-erasure. When admiration turns into kneeling, something essential is misplaced. This reflection questions our habit of sanctifying the past — and asks what it would mean to remember ourselves instead.
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What unsettles me in the language of this video is not admiration itself, but the posture it encourages. The awe, the reverence, the impulse to kneel before the Vedrus people and their wedding ritual carries an assumption I find worth examining. It quietly suggests separation — that they are something other than us, something elevated, something lost.
Yet they are simply people, living in a way that is natural to them. Their lives unfold with fewer interruptions from imposed narratives, fewer distortions introduced by modern systems of coercion and abstraction. This does not make them divine. It makes them human — perhaps more intact, more coherent, more aligned than what modern conditions often allow, but not fundamentally different.
We often speak of human potential as though it were something buried in the past or reserved for rare individuals who escape the machinery of the modern world. But potential is not a historical artifact. It is not something we inherit through time. It is something we access through presence, through choice, through how we orient ourselves to life in this moment.
When reverence turns into self-lowering, something essential is lost. Humility, when genuine, does not diminish us. It clarifies us. But reverence that requires us to kneel — to regard ourselves as lesser — subtly erodes our own dignity. It suggests that what we recognize in them does not already exist within us.
If these people are our ancestors, then what we see in them is not something to worship, but something to remember. Not to exalt, but to recognize. What they embody is not inaccessible — it is immediate. One shift in perception, one reorientation of values, one conscious decision away from fragmentation and toward wholeness.
The tendency to sanctify the past — to turn former peoples or civilizations into symbols of lost perfection — mirrors the same religious impulse that has always externalized truth. It places meaning elsewhere, earlier, beyond reach. But life does not move that way. It is not linear in the way we are taught to believe.
Everything is here. If anything has been carried forward through generations, it is not a set of rituals or bloodlines, but the capacity to live truthfully. That capacity has never left us. It has only been obscured.
Perhaps the invitation is not to kneel before what once was, but to stand fully within what is — and to remember ourselves.
Temet nosce