May you land on holy ground

You drop to the earth, open your palms. It’s either brokenness or the heart’s humility that brought you here, to Earth-bottom. The form is the same, the borders of feeling broken or humble are almost indistinct: pain humbles you and your humbling opens you up to your pain, the world’s pain. There is no longer a differentiation between what is yours or what is of another.

Welcome to Earth-bottom. Here, you must come bare-footed, soles uncovered. It is a place of roots and moisture, a dark aliveness that you will know only through compost. This is home to all that’s passed and yet to pass, with its hunger-filled inhabitants. In soil, there is never a lack – of space, of food or water. You are never alone, but held in the vast mycelium of belonging. You must unclothe, your belly round like a sweet melon pregnant with seed and story. Unravel, lie down and open.

To reach Earth-bottom is to be given a gift, an invitation to a fuller life.
The breathing moss will imbibe the density of your daily existence you’ve known so far.
You may speak your grief to bark, whisper your losses to the black raven. All you need is within root and seed.

In Earth-bottom, you become seed.
Isn’t this how any Thing begins and ends? No resistance, crack open and bloom.

So, if you are lucky enough to fall to bottom – choose earth, for rock will harden you, will make your sorrows calcify, your skin rigid and impermeable.
Choose earth instead of rock as then you will transform. Your blood becomes the river, the moon belly’s umbilicus attaches to taproot that feeds all.

You become an apple tree and everything you loved and love, will feed from you for ever.

***






A poem by Pesha Gertler, The Healing Time – may you also stumble down the wrong street and make your wounds holy.

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin and bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them,
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.