Find Your Ground: A Love Story ✨

Landscape. Love. And You.

Hello Reader

How do specific places, and landscapes, form who we are? As in: How might our lives--our very bodies!---be mutually implicated in theirs?

How might the places and lands we love show us how to love in the rest of life? As in: How do we move beyond beholding landscape, and visiting it, to receive how specific places can alter our actions within the lesser seen wrinkles of daily life?

I've been thinking about these questions for a long time, and today I invite you to explore them with me, and to add your own!

What "ground" is your heart home? (You may know a few!) What stories arise from this ground? How do you tell them? And how might you live them?

If you're especially interested in these forms of embodied inquiry, simply reply to this email to receive more info about seasonal small-group gatherings I'll be tending for unearthing and expressing these land love stories.

Cheers,

Jennifer

Ordinary Nature

Weekly Reflection 🌱
Weekly Practice ✨
Little Tender Things 💚

WEEKLY REFLECTION

Desertscape and Dusty Love

Jennifer Ruth Keller

When I start to feel squeezed I check in with my family and head out the door for a walk up the paved-street hill behind our neighborhood, towards the last reaches of residential development that stretch into denuded shrub-steppe, and, beyond that, into last-shrub-steppe-standing.

Atop a hill, huffing with exertion more than I’d like to be, I can look past the houses which shouldn’t be where they are, and shift my sense of place, and person, and presence. I leave one mode behind, and arrive, or release, into another.

Sometimes I have to settle for eye contact with the shrub-steppe as the entrypoint into full-bodied reconnection. But if I walk far enough, I can get to an area where I can touch un-intruded sagebrush, rabbitbrush, and other undisturbed scrub.

When I stop the climb, sweat disappears into the air. I look up, and around, and let the sky’s expanse scoop me out. The feathery softness of sage leaves makes me stop, every time, to remember the plant is not only twisted trunk, and hardy survivor, but a lush companion brimming with scent and tender color. I, in effect, stop being the surface version of myself, and let that different, abiding version of me make contact, and be received, and receive in turn.

It’s not a nostalgic communion, or a romanticized glossy love. My love with the desert is messy, storied, and what I’ll now call “dusty”—that is: unpristine, prone to dirt, sometimes in need of a good sweep, sometimes in need of a good dust settling.

I wouldn’t know who I am without the desert. For reasons known and unknown, three desert landscapes (and one Sumatran jungle!) have been the most pivotal places within my lifetime. Each desert is within me, and beyond me, a source of my story while also always stretching me past that story.

What about the desert? Would the desert know itself without me? It’s a strange kind of question, that reversal of consideration. Maybe what it asks is: Does it matter to the desert that I’m there?

And what I’ve come to sense across the last decade is this: The question is not the right question. I am here. Humans are on earth. I am part of the living world with the shrub-steppe, so it’s not a question as to whether that matters to the desert. It simply is the case. And so, I can dispense with the questions, and their built-in notions that me and the desert are somehow of different orders, and live from that fact—that we are of the same order, companion creatures netted within an entire ecosystem.

Once I glimpsed this shift, the simplicity of it was like a bell. For me, living into the shift has been a messier, highly erratic process. It’s very difficult to unravel a lifetime of erroneous thinking. There is no fast fix, or detour.

The good thing about the desert is it's a place of non-hurried time, able to bear with my slow-going, cumulative change. (Of course the desert withstanding the acreage of development on the glaciated slopes is a very different thing, and a problem, as the shrub-steppe diminishes year by year due to human activity.)

The pace of living with/as “nature” is not the pace of living with/as “society.” Walk by walk, little by little, I’m trying to rebuild a life flow and feel in which I’m more guided by the former than the latter. For me, my evolving love affair with the desert is one way into, and through, that navigation.

How about you? What places, or landscapes, or earth locales call you to them, to live with them, and from them?

WEEKLY PRACTICE INVITATION

The what: What Land Do You Love? And How?

To explore: The land(s) you love may be near you. They may be places you can be with via remembrance. Either (or both!) works for this exploration, with obvious adjustments as needed.

Part 1

Go to the place or landscape. Allow ourself a good 10 minutes or so just to arrive, to be there, and then to release into that shift of being with the place, as co-creature or companion beings, rather than as "human visitor."

No need to get fancy about that. A good way in is through sensory openness, which allows the shift to emerge.

Once arrived in the "withness" sensation, and without forcing it, notice whether/how stories you have with this place begin to arrive. Might be in glimpses, or little bits.

Allow a space of time for this kind of sensory-open, free-association with your special landscape.

Part 2

Now, there's no precise boundary between these parts of the exploration. And no "correct" order. So this is just a suggestion of a potential flow of the exploration.

A next arising you can notice is: What emotions well up in my body as I'm with this place?

Experience the sensations, and no need to worry so much about naming everything. If names for the emotions come to you, great. If not, totally fine too.

Part 3

Again, this is a next suggestion. Explore if it feels right for you. Feel free to try your own adaptations!

What tone or shape or flavor of love, or devotion, or wild spark of delight, or deep ember of knowing-passion might you like to offer to your place?