our kith and kin surround us, here, and though relating with people may dominate my mind, relationships to all living forms bring me firmly to my senses.
then i recognise the soil under my feet, and relax into it, i often forget that the earth is supporting me, grounding, rooting. now i lay down as a daily practice, to fully abandon my weight to the gravitational pull, so my mind grows very still. i don’t have to do this alone.
then i notice the air, its scents, its microbial richness, and that we are in constant exchange, that it makes me, becomes me through my lungs and blood and beating heart. that i’m not singular.
then i pause to feel the sun touching my skin, kind old friend, have i really noticed you since i was a child? and i loaf a little in it as our animal family loafs around me.
then i drink the water from the well and it becomes me, and i know my work is to protect its sweetness and clarity. i swim in the lake that sustains the island, immersed in the source.
then as i eat i think of the life cycling through, the soil we tended, the seeds we saved and sowed and watered, the gratitude of the harvest. this table tells us the story told by the land. so my body is made again each day in its image.
if i sit on a damp log under the old trees while the ducks noodle at the margins, and the goats nudge me for a scratch, and they grow still and heavy lidded blissing on it, and old pepper hen sings her quiet greeting, always standing companionably near me like a little shadow, and the hummingbird who lives in the thicket dives and calls, and the blossoms and bees are bursting all around us, then the fruit grows round and full and calls us to it, then the leaves blush bright and pattern a carpet at our feet, then the frost decorates the bare bones of it all, well. i am home. i am it, i become it.
older cultures than the dominant, modernist one – that threw off the past and the land as a chain – they speak of honouring ones parents, ones elders, ones kith and kin. when i reconnect like this, the relationships feel manifest. a reciprocal pleasure, to be of service to all of life.
*
this is one of those crossroads where we meet up with new-and-ancient ways of being, with a heritage that may have been lost for generations. we recognise the landmarks. a dormant sense of direction awakens, a latent awareness that there is more to life than the story of dominance and superiority, separateness and competition. that in an enormous collaboration we are alive at all, and that to regenerate and repair harm, the first work is to even see ourselves as embedded in life, as part of a resoundingly collective whole.
this is why a renaissance of connection empowers us simply to slow down and be present. in recognising who we are, in mutual webs of relationship, we can begin to live quite differently. the paradigm shift is primary. it doesn’t look like doing very much at all, not at first. but the profound change we need to create for the thriving of all beings is first sowed by a vast seed-sharing of the reclaimed ideas of belonging and reciprocity.
we start there. then we can trust ourselves to navigate by—-with—- the stars, find our way by —-yes! with!—- the old landmarks that still mark the way. and wherever we go next, we can bring the seeds of a heritage to revive anew, that of being profoundly interconnected, co-creating possible futures with life itself.
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this love letter is to all living beings, and i send it out to you, friends, good patrons of this growing collection of small works. i invite you to write back, perhaps in response or with a question. what would you like to see me give attention to?