Solstice-y

We are approaching the deepest darkness of the calendrical turning, and if you have been unable to tune out the ‘news’, you are getting a steady drumbeat of the litany of the grotesque. Pathological narcissism, depravity, grief, and rage are the currencies being arbitraged globally. Macabre scenes from all corners, rogue and state-sanctioned violence, institutionalized mockery, a steady diet of falsehoods and fabrications, obscurations.

In a world that can’t seem to help itself from configuring salvation as something to be sought upward and outward, this is an opportune moment to re-orient– spiritually and neurobiologically– to an awareness of the inward and downward. I invite, and encourage you, over the next few weeks, to make time to practice touching the ground.

What moment more than the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, invites us to quiet the mind, the outer rumblings, our intent fascination with the seen– and turn inward? What are the inward landscapes of restoration and recovery into which we can settle at this moment of seasonal stillness? What season more than deep winter invites our attention downward, to the earth, the soil, the chthonic, the ancestors underground? To listening downward for the voices of the earth, herself? What season invites us to contemplate the deep mysteries of soil– the hard freeze, the caesura, the pause– required to reset something deep in the compass of the blood?

For it seems our refusal to slow down, to grieve, to turn inward, to collapse, to let ourselves be moved– all of the ways that we resist contact with the unknown, the unseen, the subconscious, the subterranean– these refusals of introspection, interoception, proprioception, and rootedness are in fact a very fountain of our inability to find our way home.

What if the way home is not up and out, but down and in? What if, to find our center, we must go inward and downward as deep and far as we have been taught to go outward and upward?

For those of you in whom these words register with some rememberance, this is a primary inquiry of the new book, GROUND: How Modernity Disconnected from the Earth, Why it Matters, & How to Fix It. In January and February I will be teaching a live 4-part class on these themes: GROUNDED.

It is surely ironic that modern people, we who have lost the format of the village, are configured by traumatic loss into shutdown that we do not realize that we are carrying. That our very loss takes the form of the inability to feel itself. My curiosity is the transformation of this phenomena, widespread in the world to its great detriment, the root of much chronic illness, the font of untold suffering.

Here is an audio recording from the first reading of GROUND, on its release date, December 15. (Playback speed is adjustable on the right in the little dial.)