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<\/p>\nNewsletter from August 23, 2024<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This year has felt like an excavation.\u00a0 I have been trying to clear away layers and layers of artificial structure to get down to the ground.\u00a0 I have been pondering things like land.<\/p>\n
I enjoy being in natural spaces to hike and explore.\u00a0 This is one ground that feels solid. \u00a0My feet find a surface of loamy turf or hard rock and there is contact to hold me standing or to push against to walk.<\/p>\n
From there I have been thinking about things like maps.\u00a0 If I was hiking somewhere and crossed a stream, I might have crossed some kind of invisible barrier where one side was one jurisdiction and the other was completely different.\u00a0 If I was just hiking aware of the land, I wouldn\u2019t necessarily have any sense that I was in a completely different place because the map is an artificial structure. Where I\u2019m sitting now is called St. Paul, Minnesota. The land itself, however, has no name.\u00a0 Any name is made up.\u00a0 The land is itself.<\/p>\n
If I was out on a boat in the nearby St. Croix river I may be having a wonderful time all the while weaving between the state of Minnesota and the state of Wisconsin.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t necessarily be able to tell which state I was in at any given time.\u00a0 There is no line painted down the center of the water.\u00a0 There are different rules in play though, depending on which state made the laws that are enforced there.<\/p>\n
The river has no rules to enforce.\u00a0 It is itself a living thing. At the ground, any guidelines for behavior rightfully need to be followed in relationship to the river.<\/p>\n
Think of the contrast for enslaved people of crossing into the North and freedom.\u00a0 Even though on the ground, things are not so different on either side of the line, what we made up and put on top of the land, a boundary, a line, a marker, an imaginary, yet agreed to set of rules, was vastly different.\u00a0 On one side was enslavement, on the other, freedom.\u00a0 The land itself has no rules like that.\u00a0 The land gives itself in trees and fruit and beauty.\u00a0 It holds no one in bondage.<\/p>\n
I have been thinking about things like private property, and, in this exploration of the ground, what a strange thing it is that we made up the idea of private property.\u00a0 The land in itself cannot be owned.\u00a0 But certainly the rules and agreements we have added on top create a whole structure whereby we can disenfranchise some, break the continuity of relationship to the land we live on, and some people profit.<\/p>\n
Although artificial and unreal to some extent, it is the nature of society, of community, even of language to create a bunch of rules, agreements, structures and names to overlay the ground.\u00a0 Just because private property is made up and in some respects is absurd and unreal, I still need to pay my mortgage to stay in my house and tend the piece of ground I live on.\u00a0 We live in both the ground and in the make-believe relative layer of reality simultaneously.<\/p>\n
I wonder how one can be oriented toward the ground, the base layer, more than in all that has been made up?\u00a0What kind of corrective could the ground provide to our systems and rules if we were in robust relationship with it as our primary experience?<\/p>\n
And what does this look like with something less concrete, like living a life?<\/p>\n
As I walk my dog, so often I catch myself thinking through the past or sorting out the future so that I haven\u2019t seen the trees or felt the wind, or noticed the sky and the majesty of the clouds.\u00a0 The trees, wind and clouds are closer to the ground than whatever happened yesterday or whatever happens tomorrow. The effect of my lending attention to them, is that I am lost to the ground.\u00a0 I\u2019m floating in an imaginary space.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want to live in an imaginary space.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to miss the exquisite ripples of breeze on my cheek to spin in circles of imagination and thought.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been experimenting.\u00a0 Most of my thought is just busy work.\u00a0 I can live without it.\u00a0 In fact, there\u2019s something about the level of investment in thought that directly dampens my experience of living.\u00a0 So it might be more accurate to say that I can\u2019t actually live connected to the ground if I go around mostly with my head in my thoughts all day.\u00a0 It just doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n
I also notice when I bring my investment of attention to the breeze, the trees and the clouds, sometimes what can happen is that I get lost there, and not in a bad way.\u00a0 For a moment, my breathing is the movement of the clouds and, in some way, we are one.\u00a0 Even more deeply connected than relationship, somehow we become simultaneous.<\/p>\n
Has this happened to you before?<\/p>\n
What could happen if your primary experience shifted from imagination to real life in real time?\u00a0 What possibilities could arise as a corrective for life if we could tell what was real from what was made up? \u00a0What kinds of things could we dream up if the ground was our first reality, our teacher and our inspiration?<\/p>\n
Perhaps it would be more like an exploration of the woods than driving on a highway.\u00a0 Maybe it would be more intimate and sensual than the stimulation of sitting in front of the phone scrolling.\u00a0 Maybe we could become well in some very fundamental ways that stay broken and unnoticed in the structured places we have made up.\u00a0 Maybe we could be as free, generous and consistent as the ground.\u00a0 What might it be like?<\/p>\n
An exploration of the ground, of the oneness that lives right now in this moment is the first move of the 4 part webinar I\u2019m putting on in September, \u201cReclaiming Oneness\u201d.\u00a0 When we live grounded, what we have made up can become obvious, malleable, and we become creative.\u00a0 When we hold space for others and guide them to the ground, healing, change and new flourishing can happen.<\/p>\n
If you hold space for others, the more access you have to the ground, the more possibility you can hold. The more transparent are the structures that are extra, the more we can wonder about letting go or creating something new. \u00a0The more robustly \u00a0grounded we are, the more we can see what warps our ability to live a natural and healthy life so we can adjust and correct.\u00a0 More info is available at “Reclaiming Oneness<\/a>“. Come touch the ground with me and see what goodness can ripple out from there.<\/p>\n Where do you experience contact with the ground?\u00a0 Feel free to reach out and tell me.\u00a0 I would love to hear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Come touch the ground with me and see what goodness can ripple out from there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ground-of-being"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahcledwynblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahcledwynblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahcledwynblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahcledwynblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahcledwynblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahcledwynblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahcledwynblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahcledwynblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahcledwynblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahcledwynblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}