He had never thought of himself as an especially reverent person, the word carrying too much freight--all sorts of false piety--for him to consider applying it to himself. But that is the way he found himself feeling that afternoon in July when he walked out of the building where he worked and paused to look around him at the light in the trees. That was all, just the light shining through the everyday suburban New Jersey foliage on an otherwise unremarkable day in July, the city roaring in the distance visible through the haze, geese waddling around on the edge of the parking lot, ragged white clouds sailing overhead. He stood there thinking of the stars beyond the blue of the afternoon, and the atoms that comprised everything he could see, the age of the water in the pond across the road, having been recycled endlessly since the birth of the planet, long before the emergence of life, same molecules in the clouds as in the pond with the ducks and geese. Reverent was not precisely the right word, but it was close.