It’s a blessing:
being able to love the earth. It is something for which I am grateful,
because I am beholden to it for my very being-wellness.
How many times I have placed my hands flat upon the grass or
soil and felt the strong sensation of “being okay!” How many times have I
nearly flung myself to the ground, prostrate in surrender and gratitude?
Because the land – it feeds me. It grows. It dies after flourishing. It models
the grace, gift or bounty that being alive is.
I am indelibly printed on, tattooed, by the earth. Every wrinkle in my aging
skin reminds me of veins in a leaf or the crinkled edges of an ocean spray
bush. My hair is the birds’ nest. My eyes, the saltwater of the oceans. And my internal
organs, guts – pulsing, pumping, receiving, secreting in musical synchrony - are the very humus, the soil, the substrate. I
am marked by the earth. A brand! Claimed by her.
When I get rock hard stubborn, edgy and coarse – when all
finery eludes me and I have angered even my own sense of wholeness, I remind
myself of the vultures: flying,
circling, swooping lower, always and ever prepared to dive in, eating the flesh
of a stinking rotten thing. A dead thing, a done thing. Something or someone to
feed on.
When I am sweet, gentle, and loving toward others or myself,
I am the willow tree – lithe and swaying, delicate yet firmly planted in the
ground. Water to drink, by the river’s edge. Shining in the sunlight – tendrils
hanging in the shady cover over the tall grass.
I am the land. And it is me. All of it: waters – salt and fresh; mud, rocks, tilled
soil, sand, grasses, moss and vines; in every creature, too, I can find the
mirror of my own self. The seasons, too, mirror me and I, them. The grandmother
of a friend has the reputation of responding to complaints about small problems
in life with these words: “It is just a season.” This both locks the vital
life-giving potential into the heart of the matter, as well as makes trite
everything that serves to distract us from this soulful center. The earth. The
land.
It is a blessing:
being able to love the earth. It is also a blessing to remember I am
inseparable from it. I am earth. So are you.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
