Digging Deeper

I am rooted in the earth as I walk, everywhere I walk, every when I walk.  The concrete beneath me presents no barrier, it too is of the earth and my roots are strong.  I feel myself as a great column connecting the Earth to the sky.  I am the sea in which millions upon millions of beings swim in wild freedom.

There was a time when these constructs seemed like obstacles.  Concrete and stairs, pavement and walls.  I have put away such perceptions.  When I touch these things they seem solid but they are not.  They are constructs that pretend at definition.  They are tangible because in my physicality they define a limitation.  In my mind and spirit, they present nothing, I soar through the space between nuclei, electrons and protons pass by me like dwindling stars in a midnight sky.

I have no greater right to exist than the smallest microbe or the largest complex organism.  Without this right, what am I?  I am disembodied consciousness.  I am a will to survive.  I am the bear running through water to protect her cubs, I am the wren watching over her hatchlings.

I am the first arrival at the banquet table of wild nature and I am the next serving of dinner.  How many tomatoes lay in this flesh?  How many trees will feast from my bones?  We act as parent to everything that benefits from our putrescence.  I am not the product of the love of millions, I am the product of the love of infinite beings, rising, falling, living, dying and living again.

I can sense the deep brown darkness of the Earth, the rocks and bones and living things.  I feel them in my muscles, tightening as I lift my hand, my arm, my head, my eyes.  I taste it on the air, bittersweet, "don't leave me.", "Come home"

I am rooted in the Earth as I walk, I am rooted in the air as I talk, I am rooted in the fire as I transform, I am rooted in the water as I remember.  I drag these things up with me, like a sheet off the circular tableau of reality, from the center where my spirit dances in strange winds and uncommon breezes.  I present myself to the universe and I see myself smiling back at me.

Months ago I remember explaining to one of my mentors that I didn't feel I could effectively "ground" at work.  It is after all a prison and has an oppressive feel to it.  While he did not come out and say anything to discredit my statement, I had a very real impression that he did not understand what I meant, he had previously stated he could root (ground) nearly anywhere.  The last several months since that discussion have found me experimenting more with grounding and rooting to the point that I can now do this almost anywhere, in large part because I realized that I was the only real barrier to grounding.  I allowed myself to believe that the physical constructs around me separated me from nature, from the wilderness and realized that these things are inside me and a part of me as much as they are a part of everything else.  The above italicized text is the actualization of thought that I had while undertaking routine duties at work.  I sat down and typed it as I finished my work.

We are nature and nature is in us.  We are wild.  The constructs that prevent us from being wild are those we make for ourselves.  They are a barrier to involvement because it is far easier to rely on the relative security of not being wild.  Everything in nature is an ordered part of a complex system that often exceeds the grasp of our human perception.  So what?  Why give up on learning what we can while we can.  If we have no greater right to exist than any other being, then giving up on creating relationship with something because it scares us that we may not have control (and we do not have control) tells us all we need to know about who we are.

We must surrender to Nature and in doing so, she will teach us all we need to know.