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I have let my garden go this year. It is growing in wild abandon, ignoring my well-placed circles and lines of plantings from years before. It is scoffing at my incessant weeding habits of the past. It has plummeted into extravagant plumes of plants that I had no idea lingered below just waiting to erupt. They sidled up to my perennials with a come-hither sway to their leaves, and the party was on.

There is a feeling in this place now that is like an electrical charge. It is scented with the red-hot of unexpressed passion. What a panorama for my grounding practice.

Grounding, to me, means to become present to where you are and to expand toward what is beyond at the same moment. A metaphorical and energetic for some, myself included, cord comes from the very core of the earth and swoons with delight at the fragrance of the loamy touch of where we stand.

It winds through my feet, then my center and out the top of my head, whereby now, in lilting strokes of anticipation, this waving ribbon will connect me to the great cosmic dance where it will twirl with the deftness of the accomplished hoofer of the universal ballroom experience. That sentence was as long as the string itself. Ah, solid ground, how you waltz me about. What could be better?

Oh, really big ocean boat, how you unearth me and spin me with your watery sentience. I am upon the deep, wet sea of the great unconscious. I sense Jung lurking about in the briny mist. My rock tethered interior is now unmoored and afloat on the waves. My feet become part of the waters of constant movement. I feel like I can sink into its depths instead of my usual travels through the solidness of earth. It rises to meet me, but this aqueous shindig is dancing me right into the walls, that for some reason keep moving.

My center of gravity has shifted. It needs to be as fluid as the waves that are tussling us about, ever so gently. This is a different kind of waltz. Actually, it is more like a rhumba. This is the dance of surrender to the inner and the outer. This grounding flavor is new to me. I taste the vastness of the salty, roiling sea, not the savory taste of land. I close my eyes and breathe in its aroma.

And I breathe again, now back home in my familiar to my spirit earthiness. There is something so cooling and nurturing about the feel of bare feet on the ground. The arches and planes of my feet are covered with earthy mirth. I am again connected to the deepness of being; the being of the world outside of me and within.

Oh, how wondrous…wait, what? Did I just hear the news correctly? We, in Vermont, are now believed to be perched on the top of some future lava spewing volcano?! Well, that tugs at my cord, now doesn’t it? How might one maneuver her silken tress of spiritual glee through a fire that will vaporize it before even a giggle can come forth?

We are sitting on a future giant swell of red-hot magma. Scolding spurts of its turbid being may be permeating our consciousness this very minute as it churns below us.

Well, this is going to change our grounding practices, isn’t it? Walk easy and be cool. Miles Davis, where are you?

In a more cynical turn of thought, I wonder what this will do to the homegrown metaphysical devotion that abounds here? It seems there might be a new stream of meditational obsession for the spiritual larder.

New prayers, new dances, new catchwords. ‘Well, just let that idea bubble awhile’, now has a direct and physical reality, so that to ‘simmer a pot’, could now refer to a spiritual and emotional process. Making pasta may take on a whole new meaning. Well, I’ve been simmering stuff in a cauldron for years, but that’s another tale.

So perhaps letting my garden have its way with itself was a foreshadowing of the flames of the interior that are bounding their way toward us…in 50 million years, give or take a few millennia. So for now, I will tread with added awareness and perhaps a lighter foot so as not to get burned by what life has in store for us.

This was first published in Vermont Views Magazine: http://www.vermontviews.org/vermontviews.org/An_A-musing_Life.html