Why Sacredness Still Matters — and How Art Reveals It

When’s the last time you truly took a second to experience silence? No music. No movement. Just air — thick with possibility. Just like light streaming through stained glass, touching the wooden floor in fractured fragments of blue and gold. And with no sound to fill the space, you’ll have felt it: the hush before creation. A kind of breathing.

In those moments, I’ve realized something that would take years to articulate:
This space defined by silence wasn’t just a space for performance. It was a space for meaning.

And not all meaning is loud.

That space beyond the notated page was sacred.

A sculptor’s first cut into stone was sacred.

a writer’s first blank page was sacred.

But not because of its architecture.
Because of its intention. Its stillness. Its invitation to listen differently.

What Makes Something Sacred?

When we hear the word sacred, many think of the religious — the holy, the sanctified, the set apart for worship. And yes, the sacred is all of these things.

But it’s also something more fundamental, more deeply human:

The sacred is that which is deliberately filled with meaning.
It is what we choose to treat with reverence, focus, and care.

In the world of artistry, the sacred appears constantly:

• In gesture — the conductor’s inhale before the first downbeat

• In form — a recurring motif that becomes ritual

• In texture — multiple lines converging into one moment of luminous harmony

• In silence — the breath between cadences that holds the emotional truth

The sacred is not a genre.
It is not exclusively religious.
It is a category of presence.

To name something as sacred is to give it weight — not heaviness, but significance. It means we see it differently, engage it differently, offer ourselves differently in response to it.

In that way, sacredness is not imposed. It is cultivated.

“To create something sacred is to imbue the ordinary with reverence.”

Finding What’s Sacred Within You

So what, then, is sacred to you?

Is it silence before you write?
The journal entry before you compose?
The light through the window as you warm up your voice?

These are not distractions — they are rituals.
And the more you notice them, the more sacred they become.

As an artist, your job is not just to make.
It is to offer that is which to be received.

And what you offer flows directly from what you hold sacred.

Here are a few questions to begin that inward search:

• When do I feel most spiritually aligned in my art?

• What practices help me center myself before I create?

• What themes or symbols recur in my work — and what do they mean to me?

• Where do reverence, awe, grief, and longing show up in what I make?

The more intentional you become with what is sacred to you, the more impact your work will carry — not through volume or polish, but through resonance.

Because sacredness isn’t something that comes after you create.
It’s the way you enter in.

A Final Word

At HXHM, I use the word sacred often — to describe not only spiritual practices, but compositional structures, harmonic tension, symbolic clothing, and even digital design.

Not to be lofty.

But to remind us that meaning is made.
And it begins with how we show up.

So whatever you’re creating this week —
Pause.
Breathe.
Ask: What makes this sacred?

Then shape it from there.