Dear Reader,

Is the early morning sacred to you? Or maybe the passing thoughts you have in airplanes– things you can’t seem to write down correctly. What about the sea? Your name? The guest room? A kiddie pool baptism? A predetermined grave?

All of these things appear in the “Sacred Issue,” where these writers have created religions of their own– found gods worthy of worship in simple things like overheard conversations, recurring dreams, and microwaved dinners. They capture the open-ended nature of the sacred and use the idea to piece together their own ways of finding beauty and carrying on. After all, sacredness isn’t determined by a religion or set of rules, but by the people who choose to make something more than it is. In this issue, writers locate the sacred in the intertwining connections between the everyday-ness of our human lives, the past, and the dead– ancestors, strangers, lovers, old friends, unknown namesakes.

The sacred is not just a way to delude ourselves out of harsh realities, to cheat a way out of grieving. Rather, sacred moments help these authors sink deeply into a life that is both permeated with the blessed and is also a cataract of the banal. Here, these authors bear witness to burial rituals, bloody omens, self-conscious prayers, returning home, growing up, loss, and the sun. What is sacred often depends on the morning, and how you choose to write about it.

In a world that often appears anything but blessed, we ask you to think about sacredness; we offer you images and stories to help conjure it for yourself. Bleary eyed Rastall’s brunches, a rainy February, the view from the fourth floor of the library, your walk to class in the morning. You may be surprised with what you find.

– The Cipher Staff