Earth, Now

I’ve been mulling what to say about the upcoming Earth season for quite some time, conditions being what they are. There’s an Earth season every year (every late summer), and I do an Earth retreat every late summer.

There are some themes that are recognizably carried from year to year, of course, because it’s the Earth element; it’s late summer. It comes, and comes again. But there are aspects of each late summer that are completely unique to that year, to these times.

This year seems to me to be a time of extraordinary pain and distress for the Earth element.

Not that this Earth pain is entirely new, but it’s certainly an extreme in my experience, in terms of watching people starving in Gaza; in terms of people being deported. Earth is home, nourishment, food. What is my country doing? Active shooters. Digestion?

What I don’t want—and I feel so strongly about this—is for the degree of potential overwhelm about how incredibly difficult an Earth season this is to lead to loss of heart, and to defaulting on the whole project. I believe, and I experience very strongly, that the creation of small islands of comfort, peace, home, and the ability to begin the digestive process are not just possible, but essential.

It does take community, that other thing that is so shattered in most of our lives these days, but when I say community at this point, I mean even just three or four people to work together to create a tribe, a culture, even if it’s a culture and a tribe for several hours: a little crock pot within which we could cook one good home-cooked meal to share, to nourish our integrity.

Integrity is another difficult and perhaps painful word this Earth season, but one that I think is perhaps more important than any other word pertaining to the Earth element right now. Without the pre-conditions that lead to digestion, it’s hard to have any sense of Integrity. Without a sense of integrity. It’s hard to even want to go home inside, because of how awful it feels to have so much fragmentation and undigested material on the inside. It’s easy to just go into loss of heart in the face of all of this.

I am completely dedicated—with every fiber of my being and certainly with my own life—to be creating these islands of community, of tribe, of sanity, of making ourselves enough at home together to begin to engage that high-enzyme process of digesting our lives.

This is my project, this Earth season.

My first offering around this is the Earth retreat, which is coming up on August 3, and then immediately after that comes the six week long mentorship, which is asynchronous online. That Earth mentorship will be a chance to work with these Earth issues and practices in a supported, communal environment, with a little bit of holding to get started.

All right, that’s what’s on my mind this Earth season. Thank you for listening. I hope I’ll see you there or somewhere, tending your Earth.