Earth to Earth

Dear All,

Shakespeare said, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," and Rilke wanted the earth to rise in us invisibly.  But what about its obstinate visibility?  A speck of gold the size of a pinhead can be spun out, I read somewhere, to a thread 500 feet long, yet we can still see it shine when it's beaten to 1/250,000th of an inch.  Our fantasies of the Earth as solid substance may be no more than spun dreams, metaphors for a metaphor, and matter altogether may be empty space or mere equations, as quantum physics has it, and Blake may have us collapse the universe into a grain of sand, daring an infinite ductility. 

Still, we are glad to come into shore from a swim or a sail, or to crash back onto terra firma from outer space, as in the film Gravity; glad to strain our bodies upright against the solid-seeming pull of the globe.

And as long as we're running around, we momentary uprisings of the loam in human form, we may as well admit it, and feel our bodies and minds to be earthenware.  "I am a child of earth and the starry heavens," says the Orphic Tablet at Pedelia.  Let's dare, for a week, to be children of earth with no need of heavenly validation.

This Tuesday we were water in water, blessing the watery part of the atmosphere and our own bodies and the rivers, lakes, oceans, the unbelievable pervasiveness of water on the planet.  We shared in its sacred transparent wetness.

Next Tuesday, we'll feel what it is to know the stone within ourselves, and to be mineral, gem, metal, loam in a world of these.  The soil is alive with microorganisms of all kinds, but even the dead metal and the granite are alive with a life we share.  What's that?

And we will begin to weave together this garment of incarnation, continuing to take our cues from David Spangler.  We'll braid or weave or interleave ourselves as light, air, water, earth, adding in all the organic life too eventually, and opening in at each step to the unseen or subtle dimension that accompanies all this rock and plant and flesh -- hardly solid enough, whatever Hamlet says.

all blessings to all,
Michael