earthly love, earthly lover loving heartily

I finally understand what I am doing here at the farm. I came here to get grounded. To connect with the earth. I started it before I left washington, I went kayaking. Feeling the rhythms and chaos of nature, it's abiding and unflinching slow love. It's a slow and chaotic pulse. 

I'm sitting in my old bed, an old  futon that i brought with me from Seattle to Chicago to D.C. to Chicago and finally abandoned in Jasper. My desk, my chair, everything pretty much as I left it 5 years ago. The Georgia O'Keefe Sunflower still cheering me in all its gloriosity. Stormy's excited drawings and watercolors still warming my heart. My own pictures still hanging reminding me of my friends and accomplishments and the special times I had here.

I'm back on the farm. Mercury Retrograde took me here. I came to get back to my roots, to get back to nature. To recover the roots of the agrarian connection. I'm perched atop my cotton cloud listening to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.

16 hours of complicated travel to get here. I just laughed at each new manifestation of mischievous Mercury. Leaving the airport Robert and I somehow missed the exit and added another 15 minutes to our time finally arriving here at 3 am. No matter. I had to go back.

I left something here that i needed to recover: my earth connection. I've never felt it stronger than right here. This is the most beautiful farm i have ever seen, because it is many farms in one. Most farms are pretty generic throughout, but not this one. I just keep wandering from one secret garden to the next. Each space has its own energy, it's own personality and our own sacred relationship, from the years i once lived here.

When i come here. Robert always gives me space. I wake up when i feel like it and he just goes on with his business by himself, giving me time to adjust and explore. He leaves me be until i finally come find him. I've always liked that about him. 

The rest of the family can't wait to talk to me, so i stayed in bed till they were gone. I ate a light breakfast and wandered the farm, through woods and meadows, over hilltops and river. The sky was brilliant blue and the air was warm, the sun bright in the sky. Nature pulled me along on a wonderous chaotic adventure. She asked nothing of me, expected nothing of me, absorbed my every action. I felt my feet sinking into her soft, wet earthly flesh, and I was instantly transported to bygone days of passionate affairs with her as I revelled in her beauty and symmetry her magical loving providing purity, her hopeful directing of life to grow to new heights to be its best and how she filled me with her magic. I laughed at this ancient image because it just did not fit the beautiful woman I  saw before me: The slow plodding woman of broken rhythm and guttoral undulations, encouraging growth by limiting boundaries and embracing chaos.

A romantic projection had fallen and I was seeing the gracious beauty of truth. The world as it is, not the lies I'd been told and imagined i saw. Something simpler, truer, and after the initial loss of my illusions more beautiful than I had ever seen before. Some people talk of the amazing symmetry of nature, but anyone who has ever looked for it hasn't found it. They imagine the perfect whorl of the pinecone and they draw pictures of its perfect geometry, but find it in nature they do not. Just a projection that blinds us to her true chaotic nature. As Einstein said, "God does not play dice." Perhaps, but "God is dead," spake Zarathustra and nature does. The photographer is forever searching for the perfect symmetry in a leaf to photograph it and it is always flawed. God is just another romantic projection to blind us from seeing the beautiful truth: Life is available to us: Life is ours: Life is individual and unique.

Nature called me to higher ground, pulling me into a wooded path wrapping me in a canopy of sleeping branches penetrating the sky like a network of capillaries waiting to deliver her life's blood to the sky. Deeper and deeper she lured me into her meandering tunnel till i emerged near the top in warm spot between two soft green mounds, the crease anchored by a towering oak. As I walked into this sacred space I stepped upon and crushed a decaying and broken branch. I suddenly felt like a transgressor and that I had violated the space. "It is what is." she said. "It always will be sacred. Always sacred. Like you. Someday dead, decayed, broken, and crushed, but still sacred" Mother Earth felt no more love for me than for a dead branch. "All the same," she said. "All my children. Always my children."

"Suckle" she said and i drank deeply, "Deflower me. We'll devour each other eternally" she said squeezing me tightly. "Go where you will. Do what you like. But you will always come home to me. Forever my baby. Forever my lover. Respect me and i'll be here for you. Respect me not and i'll still be here, but maybe not the way you would like me to be."

Hers is a beautiful equanimity. Hers is patient acceptance of what is. Hers is equal love for all down to the finest grain of sand and every element of the universe inside it. Hers is a compassion that always welcomes one home and gives one the strength to go out into the world again. 

I was honored to be in her presence and share in her company and conversation. I hope I can follow her example. If i don't succeed at least i know i will never disappoint her and she will always love me.