Grounding

Thoughts on the gentle hug of gravity

My days have been so busy that the only time to write is early in the morning, a time when my mind is still fresh and the dreams of the previous night still feel present, like the lingering scent of rain on a clear morning. Fall has crept in almost overnight, with cooler weather and shorter days. The leaves of the walnut trees are starting to turn their bright shade of yellow as their heavy fruit falls to the ground with a thunk. It is also a time when the earth feels softer, or I feel softer, maybe both. In the evenings lately I sit outside to watch the sunset bundled up in a sweatshirt. The swifts have departed for South America and so it’s only the bats fluttering about above the trees at dusk now. The crickets continue their chant, adding to the beauty of the evening.

Usually I sit outside with a book, but lately I’ve been trying to simply pay attention, both to the sensations in my body and the gentle pulse of the earth, so full of life. The past few months I’ve been slowly working my way through Abigail Rose Clarke’s Returning Home to Our Bodies, which is filled with somatic practices for reconnecting with body and with nature. One passage in particular has come to mind when I’ve been sitting in the backyard on these cool evenings:

You are held by the support of the earth whether or not you give your attention to it. But attention is a form of magic. And so if you give your attention to the way you are held by the earth, you can soften into that support. Softening in this way means we accept our place in the weave of the world. Not above, not separate, but held within (44).

Too often I have felt separate, from my body, from the earth, from other people. It comes from too many years living mostly in my mind. And the idea that we are separate from the earth is pervasive in our culture. We are autonomous individuals, observing, objectively, the phenomena around us—birds, the chemistry of soil, the behavior of atoms—forgetting in our Western way that we are part of all of this, that the act of observation itself changes the data (google the Observer Effect if you want to know more). This is a delusion that our Indigenous neighbors do not suffer from. So to be reminded that I am held within this earth, not walking above it, or observing from a distance, is a powerful comfort and antidote to the unchecked hubris of my culture.

And so in the evenings I sit, and feel the gentle tug of gravity holding me like an embrace against the soft skin of the earth. When I crawl into bed, I feel that same weight anchoring me, urging me towards sleep. And I am grateful, and it is enough to be held in the loving arms of the earth.