EARTH

Some of what’s in our bodies is as old as the universe…birthed in the Big Bang…and some came through a long line of supernovas….one swelling, condensing, exploding star after another… and the winds that roared between the galaxies drove it home to the Milky Way…where tens of thousands of tons of cosmic dust fall to earth each year…so earth raises up bodies from the mountains and valleys and plains made up of the Milky Way itself…
Earth Meditation, Katy Dion

©Kevin Gallagher

Marilyn Vogel

Jan Rudestam

Dear One-who-gives-us-everything, 

You are the first teacher of attention. An eternal childhood would not be enough to learn all the ways your wisdom manifests in the world. Even a single day has a season! The birds in the pear trees in front of my house do not sing their morning songs at the same time as the birds who roost in the plum tree in the back. Daylight falls across the pear trees first—this is where morning on the street begins—and the earliest birds sing from within those pear-shaped leaves. How long before the tiny feathered throats in the backyard plum tree are warmed by song? It’s only minutes before the rays reach over the house, but in that time I feel the passage of the sun across my own body, the particles of my flesh aligning east. The sun is in my body! I picture trace minerals in my blood flaring to sudden brightness like flecks of mica in granite after spring rain, but this is my language, and you speak in inconceivable increments of time. Even a day has a season! The east side of the plum tree blossoms first. 

My body has the power to create life because you have inscribed in me your deepest rhythms. You remind me of this every month when without regard for the calendar day my body becomes ripe for a not-yet-child in synchronicity with the big cherry moon. I barely sleep on this night as you are freshly re-draping the continents with your seas. Your energy is too bright, the moon vibrating in my teeth. 

Just recently I noticed some of the fruit tree leaves are shaped like their fruits. Pear tree leaves are plump like pears, apple leaves are stout like apples, and the outline of the cherry leaf droops not like its stony fruits but like their stems. The moon is shaped like a piece of gravel, and the sound the sea makes on a clear night sweeps beneath my dreams. You give us one resemblance inside another, an image of an ancient lineage that can’t be understood through cognition, for cognition wins by proving and disproving, while over these objections, my body-sense tells me that my mother is a tree.

Whatever body-sense I have, it has arisen with you, coeval with your gifts. Between us lies a channel you do not fail to use. As in late May on the farm when there was heat lightning but no thunder, and across the field a racket of Pacific chorus frogs bulged the night with a call as dense as the woods and as long as the canals, building so much materiality out of air that to stride through it seemed almost a violation. Which is how I ended up kneeling beside the cherry tree, flashing silver in the dark.   

We try to make you into objects and you will not reside in them. Not in a pond or garden, a tower or dam. Not even in the moon or sun. We try to fit you in them anyway, because our lives are fragile and because we fear death and long for something stable that will make us believe we are safe. You are patient with us. You give us everything, even our misguided towers and dams, even a moon we could not resist stepping on too. You do not teach by withholding. Yours is a gift of wholeheartedness and we are slow learners, needing to consume all of you before we realize that our bodies have no substance other than your own. We are eating our own heart and soon all that will be left will be the bleached bones of a tireless jaw.  

There is no way to consume one’s own heart without suffering. Likely soon there will be a time when, in conventional terms, humans are too late to heal what we have harmed. But in absolute terms we remain inside your rhythms: we are just another one of your seasons. You cannot be extinguished from us. The jaw will lose its ability to stand and walk and talk, to say “Yes, child, the stars are seeds” or, “When I see your face, I forget all thought.” But in the thinnest shard of molar, there will still be traces of the moon, a mineral memory of the sea.  

Katy Dion

©Kevin Gallagher

Holly Thomas

Jennifer Knochel

Holly Thomas

Jan Rudestam

Anne Schmitt

May we be guided by the spirit body of the earth and the wisdom of our earth bodies
as we work for the well-being of the soil, the mountains, the waters, the air, and all our relations.
Earth Meditation, Katy Dion

Marilyn Vogel

Irene Bailey

Charlie Turner