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About a year ago, I began setting up my new future in my new apartment by purchasing a wide range of books to come back to once the external demands of rebuilding had settled. One of these was a large coffee table book containing the complete paintings and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci.

In March, I was flipping through the book when an early Annunciation painting stopped me.

The angel Gabriel is kneeling before Mary with a sign of blessing, or perhaps peace. The scene holds an impossible stillness. The distant lake is placid. The angel has just alighted, silent, on the carpet of flowers below. All appears ordered, yet the meaning stays just out of reach. The angel’s wings echo the clouds above. The trees feel deliberate, almost coded, inviting interpretation while refusing to yield it.

The only movement in the painting seems to be the translucent, fluttering pages of the Bible, where Mary’s little finger keeps her place on the thirteenth line. While her left hand indicates the beginning of a greeting, her serious yet steady gaze holds the moment in perfect suspension.

I am no art historian or theologian, but the scene carries enormous weight.

The painting stays with me long after I close the book. I have seen it before of course, many years prior, probably in Italy on a vacation, but not in this way.

There is something in those hand movements. Something with those distant ships, which look to me like the brush strokes on the page within the Bible. The delicate, translucent veil under the Bible, with markings that look like a book binding.

The scene communicates to me that time is folding in upon itself. Mary is reading the prophecy of the future messiah as she is living it. And it all hinges on her consent in this moment. A surrender to what is. To her participation in God’s creative act.

It is a moment suspended, perfectly balanced, not in time but out of time. I will soon come to understand this as Kairos: the charged now in which the gossamer threads from God’s invisible hand can almost be glimpsed, coordinating the fluttering of a fallen leaf to the wink of a passerby, from every prior movement in history to this one present instant, where past and future arrive together.

It is what the poet Dylan Thomas once wrote of as “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” You see it all around you. You are it. Inseparable from your surroundings. You are living the great story while writing it.

Everything that ever was and will be, rolled into a single, impossibly compressed moment. And it is felt. It is perceived. It is beyond what the mind can hold. Indeed, you release the mind and the exhausting attempt to make sense of any of it. It just is. Humbling. Holy. The widest awake you have ever felt.

Perhaps you have touched such a state through deep meditation.

Or through gazing into the eyes of a beloved for the first time.

Or through trauma or life events that force a window open where light can pour in.

Or maybe you have looked up into the night sky and witnessed the great cosmic eye gazing down upon you, only to realize that it is your own looking back.

I have spoken to some of the world’s foremost scientists who have brushed up against “the force” but keep quiet for fear of professional judgment.

What is clear to me is this: no matter who you are, or what you have been conditioned to believe, moments of union, whether we name them God, grace, source, consciousness, or simply the mystery that exceeds us, are deeply human.

These are states that are felt somatically, fully embodied, and surrendered into. They have enormous gravity.

I suspect that when looking back across our lives one day, we will see that these moments of full surrender, of pure presence, where words and actions and thoughts are fused into one movement with life, are the moments we will identify as being real. As being awake for. As just being.

A human being, being.

Reading Pope Leo’s recent encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas, was another such compression moment for me. There are many reflections on the paths forward offered within it that others will continue to analyze in the coming weeks and months. But at its deepest level, the encyclical is an ancient call back to our humanity. To a deeper sense of being. To embodiment. To contemplation.

I believe technology can advance the human condition in wondrous ways. I have experienced that wonder in my own lifetime, especially with the advent of AI (which I use regularly as a thought partner and visual collaborator).

Yet when technology slowly erodes our ability to access the present moment, and to sit with ourselves in deep contemplation, it becomes easier to defer the call back home.

Ignoring that call becomes pain deferred, pain compounded, and most tragically, pain transferred to others through our blindness.

The encyclical points early on to that most famous of quotes: I am the way AND the truth AND the life. Wrapped into one I AM. It is where action, direction, and destination meet. There are no means to the end because the means ARE the meaning. One thread without the others is not enough. Where truth is not only an idea, but a way of being.

It is creation spoken in the present tense. It is compression revealing itself in the flowering of the world we make manifest through our participation.

And we must sit with ourselves to see it. To FEEL it. This is how we harness our agency. And step outside patterns where we are sleepwalking toward a future we might not actually want.

It’s Just a Matter of Perspective

But what approach are we to take in a world of enormous complexity and divisions that seem impossible to navigate?

We are given a picture of the polyhedron. That multifaceted gemstone where we are invited to see through the eyes of others, from their unique vantage. Each face distinct. Each retaining its own character. Yet together constituting a single integrated form, a form that becomes the stage for a magnificent dance of light within.

Leo XIV reminds us that today, through the mining of rare earths, human bodies are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly. The valuation has been inverted. The materials are treasured, while the human bodies extracting them – the very bodies that are the true sites of integration and meaning – are treated as disposable.

Let’s sit with this inversion for a moment and not turn our eyes away.

Words Matter

The encyclical’s emphasis on the dignity of every human being extends to the tools we use to engage with each other. Beginning with our words. Words are precious and shape the world around us. Maybe now more than ever, with the advent of LLMs.

I, for one, have lost the desire to keep arguing against the arguments. To prove myself clever in the rooms I am given access to. To convince people that I have a perspective worth seeing. Instead, I wish to create space for dialogue. Ask questions. Be curious.

Perhaps the first step is to become aware of the harsh words we speak to ourselves, the internal words we cover up with smiles. What are we ashamed of, embarrassed by, afraid to reveal? That is the wound. The tenderness. The place where we are still waiting to be loved.

That which is most buried contains the gems that we can build our lives, relationships, and ultimately the world upon.

It is our vulnerability and our shared suffering that make us deeply human and allow us to see the world through the eyes of the little ones.

Music Matters

The encyclical ends in song.

Pope Leo XIV concludes by turning toward Mary, who in Luke 1:46–55 gives voice to the Magnificat: My soul magnifies the Lord. Mary has just been told by the angel that she will conceive the Son of God. She has said her Yes. Let it be done unto me according to your word. And now she sings.

This is no sentimental flourish to be glossed over at the end of the encyclical. It is THE song of reversal.

This is the same Mary we see in Leonardo’s painting: the young woman with her hands suspended in the moment of consent. Except now she has found her voice. She is singing the cosmic reversal her Yes has brought forth.

The Pope calls this the strongest and most innovative hymn ever articulated.

The Magnificat is among the most set texts in Western sacred music. Bach set it. Vivaldi set it. Contemporary artists still set it today. And for centuries it has been sung in the evening.

A young woman’s song of cosmic reversal, repeated generation after generation. The song is true and somehow the singing of it brings the truth forward. Mary, in her singing, becomes what she sings. She is the singer and the song, the dancer and the dance.

The Yes she spoke is the Yes of her whole being. She does not just deliver the message. She is the message. The I AM that she carries within her flows through her in pure joy.

She has stepped out of time.

This is what the encyclical is calling us into. Not to be Mary, who is singular, but to receive what Mary makes available.

This is the call back to humanity. The recovery of what we lost when we forgot we were beings who could sing.

So go back through the encyclical with fresh eyes. Find where the plane of responsibility, your worldly role, resides. Remember the polyhedron. Remember Mary’s song. Which eyes can you now see through on the second reading? The third? The 13th?

The Pope has invited us into a mini awakening with this encyclical. Like Mary’s song, the document itself is a reversal. The end is really the beginning. If we look within ourselves. And find the Yes. Find the surrender. Find the I Am. And step out of time to see the world through the eyes of a child.

Last July, I took a writing workshop at Hugo House in Seattle on a whim. I only made it to one session, but that day we were invited to write somatically from our lived experience. It was a simple assignment. What does YES feel like? This is what I wrote at the time, unedited here, as it came out in stream of consciousness.

Working with AI and this poem as inspiration, I developed the visual sequence below.

This is my small yes. My fiat. My song. My radical love. My human I Am, answering the One who called it forth.

I like it. And that’s enough.