Feeling for Ground

Newsletter from August 23, 2024

This year has felt like an excavation.  I have been trying to clear away layers and layers of artificial structure to get down to the ground.  I have been pondering things like land.

I enjoy being in natural spaces to hike and explore.  This is one ground that feels solid.  My feet find a surface of loamy turf or hard rock and there is contact to hold me standing or to push against to walk.

From there I have been thinking about things like maps.  If I was hiking somewhere and crossed a stream, I might have crossed some kind of invisible barrier where one side was one jurisdiction and the other was completely different.  If I was just hiking aware of the land, I wouldn’t necessarily have any sense that I was in a completely different place because the map is an artificial structure. Where I’m sitting now is called St. Paul, Minnesota. The land itself, however, has no name.  Any name is made up.  The land is itself.

If I was out on a boat in the nearby St. Croix river I may be having a wonderful time all the while weaving between the state of Minnesota and the state of Wisconsin.  I wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which state I was in at any given time.  There is no line painted down the center of the water.  There are different rules in play though, depending on which state made the laws that are enforced there.

The river has no rules to enforce.  It is itself a living thing. At the ground, any guidelines for behavior rightfully need to be followed in relationship to the river.

Think of the contrast for enslaved people of crossing into the North and freedom.  Even though on the ground, things are not so different on either side of the line, what we made up and put on top of the land, a boundary, a line, a marker, an imaginary, yet agreed to set of rules, was vastly different.  On one side was enslavement, on the other, freedom.  The land itself has no rules like that.  The land gives itself in trees and fruit and beauty.  It holds no one in bondage.

I have been thinking about things like private property, and, in this exploration of the ground, what a strange thing it is that we made up the idea of private property.  The land in itself cannot be owned.  But certainly the rules and agreements we have added on top create a whole structure whereby we can disenfranchise some, break the continuity of relationship to the land we live on, and some people profit.

Although artificial and unreal to some extent, it is the nature of society, of community, even of language to create a bunch of rules, agreements, structures and names to overlay the ground.  Just because private property is made up and in some respects is absurd and unreal, I still need to pay my mortgage to stay in my house and tend the piece of ground I live on.  We live in both the ground and in the make-believe relative layer of reality simultaneously.

I wonder how one can be oriented toward the ground, the base layer, more than in all that has been made up? What kind of corrective could the ground provide to our systems and rules if we were in robust relationship with it as our primary experience?

And what does this look like with something less concrete, like living a life?

As I walk my dog, so often I catch myself thinking through the past or sorting out the future so that I haven’t seen the trees or felt the wind, or noticed the sky and the majesty of the clouds.  The trees, wind and clouds are closer to the ground than whatever happened yesterday or whatever happens tomorrow. The effect of my lending attention to them, is that I am lost to the ground.  I’m floating in an imaginary space.

I don’t want to live in an imaginary space.  I don’t want to miss the exquisite ripples of breeze on my cheek to spin in circles of imagination and thought.  I’ve been experimenting.  Most of my thought is just busy work.  I can live without it.  In fact, there’s something about the level of investment in thought that directly dampens my experience of living.  So it might be more accurate to say that I can’t actually live connected to the ground if I go around mostly with my head in my thoughts all day.  It just doesn’t work.

I also notice when I bring my investment of attention to the breeze, the trees and the clouds, sometimes what can happen is that I get lost there, and not in a bad way.  For a moment, my breathing is the movement of the clouds and, in some way, we are one.  Even more deeply connected than relationship, somehow we become simultaneous.

Has this happened to you before?

What could happen if your primary experience shifted from imagination to real life in real time?  What possibilities could arise as a corrective for life if we could tell what was real from what was made up?  What kinds of things could we dream up if the ground was our first reality, our teacher and our inspiration?

Perhaps it would be more like an exploration of the woods than driving on a highway.  Maybe it would be more intimate and sensual than the stimulation of sitting in front of the phone scrolling.  Maybe we could become well in some very fundamental ways that stay broken and unnoticed in the structured places we have made up.  Maybe we could be as free, generous and consistent as the ground.  What might it be like?

An exploration of the ground, of the oneness that lives right now in this moment is the first move of the 4 part webinar I’m putting on in September, “Reclaiming Oneness”.  When we live grounded, what we have made up can become obvious, malleable, and we become creative.  When we hold space for others and guide them to the ground, healing, change and new flourishing can happen.

If you hold space for others, the more access you have to the ground, the more possibility you can hold. The more transparent are the structures that are extra, the more we can wonder about letting go or creating something new.  The more robustly  grounded we are, the more we can see what warps our ability to live a natural and healthy life so we can adjust and correct.  More info is available at “Reclaiming Oneness“. Come touch the ground with me and see what goodness can ripple out from there.

Where do you experience contact with the ground?  Feel free to reach out and tell me.  I would love to hear.