Deedra’s Reviews > Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit > Status Update

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

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.