When Was The Last Time

When was the last time you touched the earth?

Not simply the ground. Of course, we feel that presence each and every day; when we rise, as we walk, as we toil. Being grounded is a good thing, and in it there is a proper ground, a ground that one has to seek, orient oneself to, participating within and without, immersed and embodied, enacting and cultivating, a through-line to the heart of being that flutters upon each engagement and oscillates a resonance of reverence for the familiar and the strange. But that is not the earth.

For those in developed habitats, it is not such an easy thing. One might say it is the reason we have become out of touch. Our surroundings are assiduously manicured, a contrived morphology of auspicious structures, dream works of idealized landscapes, disruptive topographies scattered about in a hyper-terrain of quasi-intentionality that makes the every day more manageable and predictable, providing a modest sense of comfort and control.

It is a habitat of order, direction and purpose. Every pathway is set, every angle formed, a vestigial congruence in which every destination is known. Only the sky above remains unshackled and undetermined. That, also, is not the earth.

It is not the untamed stuff from whence we came, that glint in Spinoza’s eye, the antediluvian dust of ages, our ancestral substance and form. Here we are reaching for something completely different, reaching out, reaching deep…into the ground, riveted by a spark upon its veritable sensation, pulsing through the blood, through the viscera, through the the minutiae, our consciousness awash in sublime presence. That…is the earth.

You will have to go out of your way to find it. It’s not easy to discover. One has to explore, range, drift, stretch their limitations; beyond their ordinary boundaries, beyond their ordinary sense, a new trajectory, a new potential, the necessary union calling us all…calling us quietly, slowly, reticently into a communion with a vitality that has always been there…resting, quietly and innocuously, waiting to be found, waiting to be…unearthed.

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