Down in the dirt

We seem to be having our January thaw here today—60 degrees with rain blowing in from the southwest. As much as I like getting a break from the cold, these winter warm spells aren’t much fun because they usually bring storms, which we’re expecting tonight. A few years ago a January tornado flattened a large portion of the town where my brother lives. Nothing like that is on the horizon at the moment, but as far as Kobi is concerned, a single rumble of thunder is sufficient reason to panic. It may be a long night.

It was just drizzling pleasantly this morning during my walk. The warm, moist wind made it feel like spring, and the varmints seem to think so, too. The chipmunks were out, and they’re usually reluctant to emerge until winter’s nearly gone. Maybe they’re doing reconnaissance for the groundhogs. The skunks have been out too, which means they’ll soon be doing their boy/girl nuzzlies in my back yard. That’s always pleasant.

The ground is usually frozen in the early morning when I’m out, but of course it wasn’t today. My favorite trail is a pretty steep climb, and I was slipping a little in the muddy spots. I actually have lousy balance, and I’m sure one of these days I’m going to make a wrong step and sprain my ankle for the umpteenth time, but I still love tromping along in the mud. It’s not that I love muck so much. In fact, I take a pretty dim view of muck most of the time, as my dogs would tell you if they could talk. (“Mom is such a clean freak.”) But when I’m out in the woods alone, alive to the experience of being there, I find that the sensation of my feet sinking into the ground creates a kind of shadowed ecstasy. I don’t just feel connected to the earth—I know I am the earth, the same stuff that is squishing under my feet, full of worms and rot and the seeds of new life. There is no self or seeking in that moment, just a complete surrender to the limitations of physical existence.

It’s hard to convey the quality of this bliss to someone who’s never felt it. Western dualism is so prejudiced in favor of spirit over body that we don’t have any convenient words for it. Our language for experience of the sublime—or the divine—is all about getting away from the physical world. We talk about transcendence, elation, being lifted up, feeling boundless, knowing infinity, etc. Even “mystery,” which ought to be a great all-purpose word for such an experience, doesn’t quite work, because it leaves out the joy. Mystery isn’t happy, and the happiness is at the core of communing with the mud god.

I think one of the reasons I find it so hard to live an urban life is that everything in the city conspires to obstruct this particular meditative pleasure. There are too many glittering distractions, too many potential threats that need monitoring, and you can go weeks or even months without setting your foot on anything but pavement. A lot of Wiccans practice something called the Tree of Life meditation, which is a useful bit of mud magic for the nature deprived. It was incredibly helpful to me during my Chicago years. I looked around the Web for a good description of the ritual, but couldn't find one I liked. I did find a gay male Wiccan who makes erotic prints--mostly pretty marginal, but I think this one has a special charm.




Photo by Brad Haire from Georgia Faces