This body, made of earth matter, celestial dust, wind, water, fire.
What happens when this body, when many, many bodies, the same bodies made of earth, cry to have more sun than rain? More fire than water? More heat than cool?
What happens when we falsly believe we can only be happy when it’s bright and shiny?
What happens when we don’t truly root where we are, and then rudely ask for the land to be different?
That is no way to treat a gracious host.
This is a fair-weather guest.
To enter their home and only want dessert and wine.
To tell them how their home should have more windows, or fewer books.
What happens when so many people, from so many different places, coalesce on a land where the felt sense of the spirit of the land is all-but-lost except to a few?
The body of this spirit is now small and weak and cannot be heard over the rushing around of cars and thoughts and numbness and sparkling new things made on another land by small bodies, also weak and unheard.
We are an entire country of displaced people.
We are grasping to be rooted and belong, yet scoff at your neighbor’s superficial difference in political views.
We are grasping to be rooted and belong, yet wish where we are, was not as it is. Or we wish to also be somewhere else. One foot in, one foot out. What a relationship that is!
What if all the whinging about the rain, the gray, the long, dreary winters… by so many bodies.. Bodies made of earth, made of rain, made of sky… bodies from other places used to different ways of living… what if all the whinging has been heard?
What if the whinging has become its own spirit now? And it is not so weak?
It is given strength by those who give it energy.
Everything is energy.
Our verdant forests will continue to burn. Have you not taken the time to feel the radiance of the soft, delicate mosses or the giant, commanding maples? They are as nurturing as the sunshine.
Our starfish will rot by the millions, again. Have you not taken the time to wade into the fresh waters and feel the aliveness of being in the exact same water that the orcas spend their entire existence in?
This is what happens when we don’t root where we are.
This is what happens when we feed our whinging and scoffing instead of our belonging and connection.
Root where you are.
If you are where I am,
Spend time knowing all the many kinds of huckleberries, and be pleasantly startled by the bears that also enjoy them.
The quirkiness of the caddisfly larvae in the glacial rivers creating art around their bodies out of river debris.
If you're going to eat psychedelic mushrooms, pick the ones that actually grow here and make a genuine relationship with them. Don’t pick too many. Definitely don’t eat too many. Real relationships take effort.
Never don’t be awestruck by the grandeur of Tahoma when it pops out as you come around the corner, driving to work. (If we are to root where we are, and to feed the spirit of where we are, honoring the names of the land matters. They were named such as "Snowy Mountain Peak", not after a solitary man from a foreign land, for a reason.)
And next time it rains, go stand in it, with your head facing the sky, and say "Thank you, we need more of you."
You are thanking your own beautiful rain-body too.
This is not about climate change. This is about choosing to root where you are.
Xo