Grounding in the Time of Lava

I let part of my garden go untended this year. It grew in wild abandon. It ignored my care-placed stone circles and lines of plantings when I created it years ago and scoffed at my incessant weeding habits of the past. It exploded into extravagant plumes of plants I had no idea lingered within its depth. They sidled up to my perennials with a come-hither sway to their leaves. The party was on, and it was wonderous.

To some eyes this would look like a hot mess, but to me it just looked hot. Well, not at first. I am an intuitive enough gardener to feel what my patch of solace and creative expression needs. I back it up with science, of course because I don’t want to do anything blatantly ignorant. I love the design stage that begins to enliven my winter hands. Oh, the lists and diagrams! But this year I knew I had to bow to what the garden was calling for. The Devas needed to breathe big this year. What first looked like pandemonium became wild, passionate wisdom. What an opulent panorama for my dailyish grounding practice.

Grounding, to me, means to become present to where you are. This gives me the capacity to expand toward what is beyond and to look back to the past without dissolving into a traumatized mound of mud. These days we need to do this more than ever.

I conjure the requisite grounding cord to come from the spirit of this lush growth. It rises from the bounty and transforms into a verdant green vine. We swoon with delight in the loamy richness of it all. It is bedazzled with drops of dew from the morning that glitter in my mind’s eye.

It winds through my feet, then my center and then out the top of my head, where by now, in lithe waves of surrender, I connect to the great cosmic stage where I am twirled with the deftness of an accomplished dancer of the universal ballroom experience. That sentence was as long as the vine itself. How I adore our waltz.

My bare feet are cooled and nurtured by the soft soil. They are covered with earthy mirth. I am connected to the world outside of me and the world within. The peace of the garden feels like smooth jazz. It resonates deep within me.

Wait, what? Did I just hear the rumble of an old news story that Vermont is perched on top of some future lava spewing volcano?! Well, that tugs at my earthy rope, now doesn’t it? It seems we are sitting on a future giant swell of hot, roiling magma. Scolding spurts of its turbid churning may be permeating our consciousness this very minute as it boils below us.

Well this is going to change our grounding practices, isn’t it? Walk cool. Miles Davis, where are you? Clearly, jazz fits every occasion. How might one maneuver her silken tresses of spiritual glee through a fire that will vaporize her before even a giggle can come forth?

In a more practical turn of thought, I wonder what this will do to the home-grown metaphysical devotion? It seems there might be a new stream of meditational obsession for the spiritual larder.

New prayers, new dances, new catch words. ‘Well, just let that idea bubble awhile’, now has a direct and physical reality, so that to ‘simmer a pot’, could refer to a newfangled 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 millennium or two. 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. But wait, isn’t there an election coming up?