The Ground & The Roots
I’ve shared before about my love of writing in lists, and about my love of the writing prompts from long-time friend and writing companion Isabel Abbott. This week, I’ve been writing about a favorite topic - rooting and grounding - and I felt inspired to share with you. Whatever else is happening, may we each be blessed with steady, fertile ground and deep roots.
1. I live in the roots as much as on the surface. I feel the ancestors in the ground beneath me, wherever I am. Sometimes I’m stunned when I remember I haven’t always lived this way. My felt intimacy with the ground is a central relationship. I’m here. I’m doing the radical act of enjoying the hell out of this bodyweight, and giving it over to gravity and support. I’m home. I have arrived. Feeling that unconditional support from the Great Mother Underfoot as the foundation for my presence. I am grateful. I lived for decades without this ground. Inhabiting this relationship now, I almost can’t imagine life without. I feel compassion for the impoverished, uptight, lonely sense of living I endured without it. Praise the ground.
2. I think of a story told by Lynn Twist about being with a tribe in the Sahara. They were preparing for relocation due to lack of water. The local women told her, “We keep dreaming there is water down below. We know there is water down there.” In that tribe, they didn’t listen to the women as guides or give them authority, but with this NGO visiting to help them, the outsiders encouraged the men to hear the women’s perspective. They said they knew there was water down there, they could feel it. With the help of the NGO, they dug, and sure enough, they found water. Our capacity to feel these things – the bedrock or lava or water or bones beneath us – I want to keep blowing on those embers of embodied knowing. Our bodies are full of these receptors that are so sensitive to the land. They are often paved over or numbed or ignored, but they’re there. I feel them.
3. This line from Martín Prechtel is one I carry with me like a secret passageway I can step through in any moment. “The people cannot be healed until the land is healed. The land cannot be healed until the people are healed by the land.” I aspire to keep deepening this way of being. To keep remembering how to be healed by the land.
4. And John O’Donohue’s line, “So much of what troubles and delights you happens on a surface you take for ground.” I see that. And I root into the ground below the surface. And I feel so drained by interactions and situations where we have to skate around on that surface so much of the overculture takes for ground, rather than the ground of the deep and real and rooted. I am most at home in the depths. Last week I got a pedicure at a local spa. When early in the session I mentioned something about grief work, the young woman perked up, and then as we were alone in the pedicure room, she told me all about her brother who took his life in 2024, and her breakup with the fake friends that resulted, and we cried together, and she kept apologizing, and I kept saying, “I am so here for it” and she kept opening up. She told me “woowoo” stories about angelic helpers who aided her to get on a plane home from Spain while she was in that altered state of sudden overwhelming grief. And we had such a deep and beautiful conversation, and we hugged like dear friends at the end, and for my scorpio introvert self, this was the best. We didn’t have to talk on the surface many take for ground. We got to the ground, and the tears, and the love, and what really matters, and it made me so happy.
5. I see and feel that absence of ground, that absence of felt connection with their own bodies, let alone the Earth, and the surface fakery in so many places, causing so much suffering, and people think that is what the world is, and that breaks my heart. Dear god, the news. Reading a piece from Lisa Renee this morning did my heart good. Here’s a wee excerpt:
“So each evening, I sit on a yoga mat to stretch and end with a message to Higher Power. I felt a little silly when I started, but now it’s my reliable daily prayer. It’s always the same:
Thank you. Please send help.
Thank you for the birds, but WTF? Thank you for the cookies but OMG? Thanks for this, help with all of that. What other message could we have for the universe, the gods, the mystical powers we do not understand or know? Awe and desperation. Gratitude and confusion.
It doesn’t feel like the beginning of a year. 2026 seems like the continuation of a long, ugly, increasingly shrill nightmare and it doesn’t look to be improving any time soon. Thank you for the breeze through the pines, the little red squirrel that leaves gifts by my door, the new winter cocktail, and also what the actual ever-loving fuck?”
6. The ground beneath my life. That unseen life trying to dream me. The river under the river. Soul. The opposite feeling of top-down domination, but rather allowing the root intelligence to reveal itself and then aligning more and more with that. The wealth I feel in this orientation to life. Trusting that headist human knowledge and ideas about managing life and reality are not the greatest intelligence nor even all that smart, but that we can align with a great intelligence in the very ground and get in right relationship with that. Embodied presence is the foundation.
7. The ground of not pathologizing. The ground of fierce compassion. The ground of presence. The ground of reverence, along with no big deal mind. The ground of a warm heart. The ground of my home, full of books and plants and altars and supplies so I’m ready to feed people and birds and beauty and the sacred in any moment. The ground of this breath. The ground of deep time. The ground of intimacy with this vast present moment. The ground of honesty, including all the multitudes inside of me. The ground of a broken open heart. Feels like fertile soil.
a collage I made a while back…
8. Speaking of fertile soil, my reverence for this patch of ground, less than half an acre, in which to garden. I’m in these months of winter where the ground is at rest, so I get to rest. Bulbs and roots and seeds are biding their time underground. Come spring, there will be flourishing. And the work to support it. I keep company with roses and tulips and hydrangea and daffodils and crocuses and snapdragons and hummingbird mint and lemon balm and bee balm and mullein and sunflowers and coreopsis and irises and hollyhocks and jupiter’s beard and calendula and strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, gooseberries, and two young hawthorn trees and the nectarine tree with tiny pink blossoms, and peach trees, and cherry trees and apple trees and a pear tree and hazelnut trees and grapevines and gaura and mugwort and lavender and the neighbor’s holy linden tree and sage and rosemary and sweetgrass and grape hyacinth and goldenrod and echinacea and California poppies and Icelandic poppies and I hope the big red poppies survive this dry winter and burdock and dandelion and rhubarb and chard and arugula and beds where I can grow peas and potatoes and peppers and tomatoes and lettuces and cabbage and kale and squash and kohlrabi and tomatillos and these plants, my companions, my friends, my teachers, my healers, my beauty ballast in an insane world, they are there, in the ground, emerging from the ground, going back to ground. Healed by the land. Indeed. As I reread this, I’m wondering if perhaps you can tell that, haha, I’m more of a maximalist than a minimalist. :) As my mom calls my style, “chaos gardening.” That’s basically my life.
9. The ground of my lineages. My ancestors, known and unknown, close and mysterious. The altar in our dining room where we offer food and water and morning coffee, and in the evening, perhaps a little pour of brandy along with a little bowl of whatever I made for dinner. Feels like they’re right here with us. I think of Malidoma Some saying, “You think unemployment is bad in this world? You should see the ancestral realm! Give them a job to do!” So I ask for help. Lately, often about hastening the end of this disaster of American politics and the reign of you know who. Please send help. Looking at the faces of these ancestors feels similar to looking at the garden, the seeds, the plants – this emerging from the ground, going back to ground, feeding the next emergence. Ancestors and current lives and future ones, lives and deaths feeding more life. And then there’s the ground of my lineage of teachers. What fertile soil! The reverence I have for these lineages and the riches in my life that come from them, imperfect humans as they are/were. And the more I revere and honor them and what I’ve learned, the more I feel fed by this ground of connection. Right now, I feel so acutely the ground of gratitude for this beautiful, hard, confusing, inspiring, brief and precious life. As Mary would say, “Just think, you have this day, and maybe still another. And maybe still another.“ Praise.
Our ever-evolving ancestor altar. As people keep joining the ranks, I realize I need a much bigger shelf!
10. The ground of language. The ground of poetry that, praise be, after reading so much for so many years, takes up a lot of space in my brain and inner dialogue. As much as I love the English language, there’s this longing for grounding in a language that offers a different worldview. An indigenous language with 70/30 verbs to nouns instead of our reifying opposite ratio in English. Language that shows the world alive, animate, moving, worthy of reverence and respect. Imagine that being implicit in the language, rather than implying objects to be dominated and used. Awe in this moment, as I see the shimmering gossamer spider strings on the pale pink orchid next to me, catching the morning sunlight. And all of that is alive and so much more verb than noun and I wish I could name that without so much clunky awkwardness.
11. Sometimes I forget. Then I get the reflection, as I did a few days ago. A dear friend who is in one of my groups expressed gratitude for the rooted, safe space to speak what is emergent, rather than figuring something out to present to the group. Her appreciation to be embodied, to be invited to share from that rooted state, to let go of any pressure for performance. And she said, “That’s just not how people interact in the world.” And then I remembered, oh yeah, I forgot that’s the case. Because other than, you know, small talk with the cashier at Trader Joe’s, that is pretty much always how I interact. From the roots. Speaking and listening for emergent truth. Caring about and curious about what is really real that may not often be named. I get to live there, and work there, and root there, which is a blessing, and which maybe also makes me odd, because I forget that’s not the norm. I’m grateful that it is my norm.
12. The ground of history with its beauty and its festering rot. The ground of shock, outrage, grief, and absurdity that is 2026. The ground shaking with a mini earthquake yesterday morning that had both me and my cat sit up straight in wide-eyed, stunned silence – and then just as suddenly it was over. The ground of deep sensitivity and feeling so much so deeply. Phew. The ground of determination to keep breathing in the truth of what is right here, and breathing out blessings, kindness, and beauty. Imperfectly. The ground that softens when I add that word, “imperfectly” onto just about anything. Rumi’s words arise from some inner ground.
“Very little grows on jagged rock.
Be ground. Be crumbled.
So wild flowers will come up
Where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different. Surrender.”
beautiful
all of it stunning and beautiful
thank you sister
I’m so glad, I paused to read your piece Erin! It was affirming on so many levels to feel the recognition, that I too experience so many of these deep rooted grounds.
Your “list” being 12, also reminded me of a mythopoetic exercise I learned from Martin Shaw, 12 Sacred Names. We were invited to find a being or place in nature, sit with them in silence, and speak praise words to their beauty, find 12 different names for them. I remember mine that days was 12 Sacred Names for the Shadow of a Cedar Tree. Your witting is like an extended version, 12 Sacred Names for Ground!
When I read these words I burst into tears. These are my kin too! I felt so suddenly and immediately connected: “I keep company with roses and tulips and hydrangea and daffodils and crocuses and snapdragons and hummingbird mint and lemon balm and bee balm and mullein and sunflowers and coreopsis and irises and hollyhocks and jupiter’s beard and calendula and strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, gooseberries, and two young hawthorn trees and the nectarine tree with tiny pink blossoms, and peach trees, and cherry trees and apple trees and a pear tree and hazelnut trees and grapevines and gaura and mugwort and lavender and the neighbor’s holy linden tree and sage and rosemary and sweetgrass and grape hyacinth and goldenrod and echinacea and California poppies and Icelandic poppies and I hope the big red poppies survive this dry winter and burdock and dandelion and rhubarb and chard and arugula and beds where I can grow peas and potatoes and peppers and tomatoes and lettuces and cabbage and kale and squash and kohlrabi and tomatillos and these plants, my companions, my friends, my teachers, my healers, my beauty ballast in an insane world, they are there, in the ground, emerging from the ground, going back to ground. Healed by the land.”