Article voiceover
I have no desire to climb now or leap or skip or reach to any heights abstract and glittering with smooth faces and foreheads unlined from the knitted troubles of time My feet give thanks for the gentle cupping of every step by the sandy clay and rough green of this particular ground My concern is the clouds that rain here in this place That soak the soil with the grace of liquid days that water and stir the melting light of flowery fields canopies for froggy weddings and cricket productions Outside my window My neighbors’ window The world is not theoretical or abstract belief or doctrine or task far away in time or place It's what root vegetables cook best at a slow Sunday boil How you clean a fish without making a mess and leaving bones So the little ones can fill their bellies unafraid It’s who shows up to honor the dead of your bodies and dreams and your loves It’s solstice, equinox and what you do at first frost That sinks into your own bones un-fileted, unsifted and makes you everything grounded and named as yourself Everything held together by your loose springy skin The world is sick from not knowing what it is It’s too big too distant too them and if only too I can’t remember and there’s no time for that I used to be sick with that too and occasionally it still prickles the insides of what I thought I should prove with "think what you can do what you could be" but not for long It’s the air I gulp and gulp on clear autumn days that reminds me never again Never again will you worship that idol Open the cage and set free your wide open life Leave the systems of perfection and symmetry and brand of high cheeks and straight shining teeth that smile at a pleasure un-lived for the image of no truth at all Leave the exile of your faith in that far away land Where you recognize no one not even yourself the lofty, abstract, and vertiginous towers where vespers stay mute and alone in their shells and no hour is appointed for supper Fly straight to the ground of your our own soggy fields that grow rutabaga best simmered on Sunday afternoons never bigger than the root of themselves Come home to the place where neighbors inquire how is it today with your soul Across suppers you lean over to pray Across suppers you lean over to pray Questions for meditation: How does the world's abstraction affect you? Does it create anxiety or a sense of being outside yourself? Are you invested in issues that affect the land and the well-being of those around you, or like most of us, mesmerized by far away images of people we can never really know and systems too complex to track? What is the remedy for a culture so abstract, so distant, so manufactured? What can you do in your daily life to be grounded where you are, for yourself, for the stretch of Earth you inhabit, for those around you? A prayer using words: Holy God of simplicity and truth, Sacred Life of Here and Now, keep us grounded in the soil of our own land, the problems of those we trust and love enough to understand, the concrete matters of living, so that we may know, really know the truth of ourselves, of each other, of you. Amen.