How well do you know the ground beneath your feet?
From the time I was 2 until I was 18 I lived in the same house on two acres in the thumb of Michigan. My sister and I knew that little piece of land and the farm fields around it better perhaps than we knew our own thoughts.
There was the beaver dam across the street, through the soybean field, past the hedgerow and into the cool dark of the woods. You could walk across the top of the dam (if you were careful) to a little bit of land (perhaps an even older beaver dam become island) where the water dripped, and the shade was dappled and cool.
In the opposite direction, behind our house and beyond the 1/4 acre vegetable garden with its neat rows of never ending work was native prairie grasses, dotted with the cedar my father had planted to be Christmas trees, most of them bolted far past appropriate Christmas tree height long since. If you wove your way through their accidental forest you came to the very back of our property and the start of the cow pasture beyond. A little low spot up there on top of that great sandy hill that filled up with water every spring as regular and reliable as snowmelt. We called it Dryad’s Bubble and we splashed in its bright water on hot spring days until the summer sun dried it out again and the pheasants moved back in.
There was the apple orchard out front, the names of each apple we knew by heart, and the grey leafed crouching shrubs with the sweet/tart berries where we built forts and brewed “coffee” from seed pods and sunshine.
I knew every square inch of that land, what grew there, where the robins nested, where the Kildeer raised their young each summer, where the tiny sweet alpine strawberries grew and the wild raspberry brambles. I knew the weathered white pine stumps in the hedgerow and which held the bleached white skull of a white-tailed deer like an ancient altar the sacred life of that place.
Children are perhaps uniquely poised learn a place in its fullness. They are curious and open, their assumptions are held loosely and their minds hungry for new things. And magic still exists in their world, the plants and animals that are their neighbors are still infused with mystical possibility. How can they not fall utterly in love with the pine that shades them with her generous branches and the oak that gives them tiny saucers and tea cups for their imaginary meals?
We adults, well we love more slowly, we don’t expect magic infused in every pebble. We are after all busy. And I wonder if the world doesn’t miss us, certainly it misses our love, because if we still loved it with the fierceness of children would we have filled its oceans with plastic or burned its forests? I cannot imagine that it is so.
For our August practice I invite you to be like children and get to know a patch of land. It may not be the place you live, it might be a corner of a park nearby or a woodlot at the end of the street. But find an accessible patch of ground that is not entirely controlled by human beings and get to know it as if it were a new friend.
And that might on the surface sound strange as a spiritual practice but for many of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions the natural world has been one of the most important ways of connecting with something greater than ourselves, with the Divine/God/Universe or simply with the web of life with which we share this incredible world.
There are of course a lot of ways to get to know a place. Here are some suggestions, I’d love to hear yours.
1. Spend regular time there. Take a blanket and a book and just hang out, or walk your dog in a specific area everyday for the next month (or year, learn it in different seasons). Go in the morning, the afternoon, after dark if you can. What is blooming, what critters are about? Just spend time consciously being with the place you wish to know better.
2. Get a different perspective. Get down at grass level, what do you see? Climb a tree (you know, if that’s safe and something you can do). Go off the path (where doing so won’t be destructive!). Get creative about viewing your surroundings differently than an adult might normally do. Look for a place a kid would see as a great fort.
3. Makeup stories about your area. One of the most common features in Celtic myth is the way place plays a part in the stories of those peoples. A particular hill might look vaguely like a woman laying on her side asleep: there’s probably a story of how the Cailleach (ancient Celtic Goddess of winter, transformation, shaper of the land, death, life, protector of deer, herds, cattle, etc) came just there and for a myriad of reasons laid down to sleep. What stories might the land around you be waiting to tell?
4. Get a field guide and learn to identify the plants, animals, and birds that share this bit of earth with you, watch their habits and their personalities and be open for the lessons they have to teach.
5. Retrain yourself to see. Once again one of my favorite practices is to take (and ideally share with someone) a photo a day. In this variation that photo has to be of the patch of Earth you are trying to learn and befriend.
6. Tend something. Uproot some lawn and plant some native shrubs, a pollinator garden, or local berries or fruits. Give your labor and time to a place and watch your contributions change it, enter into the web of connection that enriches place and people.
7. Reflect. I’m a big proponent on spending time reflecting on experiences, not simply moving on. Using a journal, talking with a spiritual director or friend, think about the way spending time with a place changed you. Did you encounter the Divine (whatever that means to you) in that place? Did the way you see and experience your surroundings change because of this intentional practice? What did you learn, how were you challenged or changed?
