Status Updates From Rooted: Life at the Crossro...

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it. - Jane Hirshfield

....Psychic layers shed and wring and replaced by a deepened sense of my inner being, of my place on earth, of interflow, of my simultaneous aloneness and enfoldment in the natural world. A crazy hermit's laughter. Good crazy.

I've been through the cycle enough times to know what happens after the period of tears, the downward spiral, and the temptation to flee. After there is nothing. A quite mind. Darkness that reveals starlight, a blanket of strange comfort. Birdsong that is bright and vivid and speaks my truest name. Every cell of my body sensing and unbound by the flimsy husk of skin....

Maybe we're afraid of solitude because it threatens us with boredom or an anxiety that can lead to difficult truths, unfinished emotional business, and the show side of human nature. - Phycologist Bill Plotkin

Humans have evolved into what they are today after the passage of 6 to 7 million years...less than 0.01% of our species' history has been spent in modern surroundings. Humans have spent over 99.99% of their time living in the natural environment...modern humans are responding to the evolutionary sudden immersion in artificial and urbanized environments by operating in a 'stress state'. - Professor Yoshifumi Miyazaki

Your feet bring your private clay to touch with the ancient, mother clay from which you first emerged. The ground of remembrance - we belong to this earth that cradles our beginning and our end, clay upon clay. Barefootedness can be an honoring of one's own closeness to the cycles of nature, the inevitable interweaving of soil and self. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

And if I am very quiet and still, and let my feet stand solid upon the earth, I can feel what I have come to call beneathness. For the soil is alive and writhing beyond my sight - roots, mycelia, decomposers, bacteria, protozoa, worms, grubs, beetles - beyond counting, beyond knowing. The living and the dead brushed together to create the quietest symphony of sound and activity. Holy ground.

Shed your shoes; this is holy ground. We tend to think this means that Moses is to remove his shoes because the ground is holy, a matter of respect or humility...
...When you take off your shoes, you will notice this is holy ground! Because what prevents you from seeing that it's holy ground is the dead skin you have to shed.

When we cross the threshold where the sidewalk ends and witness the sudden leap in the diversity of plant life and birds (other animals, too, more hidden), we are reminded that while the urban wild is meaningful, it is not, and can never be, enough.

Thirteenth-century Italian saint Francis of Assisi - patron saint of ecology, beloved far and beyond the Christian faith. Sings praise to the divine, in the words, 'through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us.' We find the sacred not simply upon the earth, but through the earth.

Some ecological activist want to reserve the world's wilderness for the material, nonhuman, big wild - the forest wilderness, the desert, the ocean, and all the planet's creatures whom they work so hard in their lives to protect...it's also important to claim wildness as a state of mind and way of being. Both dimensions of the world - the world as sacred lands and the wild as quality of consciousness.

My soul rested in a state of such delightful security and powerful bliss that there was no fear, no sorrow, or physical pain that could be suffered that would have bothered me. And then again, I was suffering. And then I was in bliss. Back and forth- first one, then the other....In the sacred whole, we are equally supported "In well and woe...both are one love." -Julian of Norwich

"It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine." - Rebecca Solnit Hope is not a remedy or even a substitute for the despair and anxiety we face in the modern world, but a companion to these things. Mature hope involves a willingness to allow that brokenness and beauty sometimes intertwine.

Hope is "that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future," and a quality that gives our actions "special urgency."

Latin: Adsum = I am here.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within. - Ursula Le Guin

(Kith) Relationship based on knowledge of place - "one's square mile" (Jay Griffiths) - where each tree and neighbor and robin and fox and stone is known, not by map or guide but by heart. Kith is intimacy with a place, its landmarks, its fragrance, the habits of its wildlings.

(Interbeing) Interdependence of all life and phenomena. Walking within this ecological/mystical perspective, a wanderer who finds a feather on a woodland pathway sees not only the bird it once clothed, but the forest that sustained the bird, the clouds, the rain, the sun, the seeding darkness. She sees the stars. She sees that her life and that of the feather-bird are indissolubly connected.

While we have more scientific knowledge of the universe than any people ever had, it is not the type of knowledge that leads to an intimate presence with a meaningful universe. The difficulty is that with the rise of modern sciences, we begin to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than as a communion of subjects. - Thomas Berry