Commusings: Touching the Earth by Lama Rod Owens

Dear Commune Community,

This week I rediscovered the earth.

We often equate the earth with the planet that we live on. And we use the term interchangeably with culture. The earth has often come to mean the people on it. We surf Google “Earth” as a means to discover the targets of our wanderlust.

But humans so easy confuse the map with the territory. The earth is, of course, the soil.

We pave it over. And then bind the biomechanics of our feet in plastic and leather only to explore a digital landscape. It’s no wonder we forget the true nature of the earth.

But this week, I rarely wore shoes. My feet sank deep into the warm sand. On a flat road, I might walk at 3 mile per hour clip. But the sand slows you down and reminds you that you cannot separate the behavior and function of your own organism from the behavior and function of your environment. You are an organment, an environism.

Touching the raw Earth is a rematriation, a return to roots, a reconnection with that which has sustained you.

My unshackled feet kissing the ground, I feel deeply into the earth and its rhythm of life. I remember that this is the place to which I will return. And …deep exhale… that’s ok.

Profound gratitude and respect for today’s essayist Lama Rod Owens for inspiring these reflections.

On the beach of IG @jeffkrasno.

In love, include me,
Jeff

• • •

Touching the Earth by Lama Rod Owens

Excerpted from The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors

So much of my practice for the past few years has been the work of touching the earth and learning how to extend my awareness into the awareness of the earth itself. 

I’ve learned to talk to the land and trees, tuning in to their secret language and allowing them to tell me what I need to be doing in this period of rapid climate change. I am not someone who imagined I would enjoy talking to trees and land, but the earth, as the Mother, has so much healing to offer us if we learn to pay attention.

My birth mother and I spent the first eight years of my life with my grandmother, my mother’s mother. There was a pecan tree in her backyard, and there were always pecans all over the house. Back then, having a pecan tree on your property was like having a gold mine. Nuts, especially pecans, were expensive to buy at the grocery store. The tree always seemed like it belonged to the community, as neighbors would come through asking us if they could gather a handful or two.

As long as I can remember, I have felt that pecans are linked to Black people’s lives. The shell reflected my skin tone and that of my family and everyone in the neighborhood. The shell was our shell, the hardness we needed to develop to survive anti-Black violence. When I bite into a pecan, I imagine tasting the brown nutrition of the earth, which holds the love of Black folks and the richness of what we have had to scrape together to survive the systems people have created to dominate the land. 

Then, there was my great-grandmother, who we called Big Mama. She was a quiet but strong-minded woman. Every summer we traveled to her house for a family reunion, making our way from northwest Georgia, past the sprawling capital of Atlanta, where the Owens had been rooted perhaps for several generations. I felt like we were driving back in time. Even back then, I could feel the heavy residual traces of slavery in that land. It felt like depression and hopelessness in my body. 

Big Mama lived at the end of a little road that gave up and collapsed into rolling hills of kudzu that stretched toward the horizon. The thick, tangled green vines covered the land like a patchwork quilt. It was a sight to behold. I would gaze out over the rising and falling hills, making up all kinds of stories about the creatures that lived in them, how the vines got there, and even what it would be like to clear the vines completely, revealing the earth’s secrets underneath. 

In the back of Big Mama’s house was a small plum tree that never looked well-tended to but still yielded sweet, purple fruit. There are two full plum trees in my front yard, and as I gather the fruit in early summer, I remember Big Mama’s tree. The land yields and provides in ways that most of us aren’t even aware of. All of these are memories of how I relate to the earth. The earth has always reminded me of family and food. As I slide my hands into it, to hold and pray to it, I lose any idea of where the earth stops and I begin.

Surrendering to Earth and Air 

More and more, I am coming to understand that healing and liberation are completely bound up with the land. When the Buddha touched the earth during his awakening, he did so not as a symbolic gesture, but as a sign of solidarity. Touching the earth reminds me that I am a living extension of it. The ground feels like my own body. The water is my blood. The wind is my breath. The rain is my tears. The thunder is my anger. 

The earth is our primary ally in liberation work not only because it offers the scaffolding that can be used to get us free. No one can get free without being guided and cared for by agents that are already free, or who are at least committed to our freedom. To touch the earth is to remember that the earth is alive, free, awakened, and feeling — that it remembers and mourns, that it loves and has no animosity toward us, that it can support us in getting free.

Yet as we touch the earth, we also begin to touch into wind, water, and fire, which also rely on the earth for support. These elements along with the earth open a profound door to healing and liberation through the natural world.

To start this journey, I offer the most precious thing I have to give: my body. I come to lie on the earth, praying to decay back into it. As ashes return to ashes, and earth returns to earth, my body longs to return back to its most fundamental being, back to the fields of dark soil growing food, to the red Georgia clay my ancestors tell me they would eat when they were starving, to the soil at the bottom of the ocean, even to the molten rock lava that initially formed this land.

Roots begin to grow from the bottom of my body and extend down deep into the earth, into the soil of its precious body. I become a child, sinking into the Mother, becoming one with her again. 

I summon the streams of love, compassion, and joy and let them flow together into awakened care and down through my root system, extending from my body to nourish the earth. 

The earth begins to awaken, to become conscious, and I feel its living energy and consciousness awakening under me. I take time to experience this awakening.

Now I shift attention to my experience of grief. I breathe into it and exhale it down into the earth, asking the earth to hold and stabilize it. The earth accepts my grief and brokenheartedness as they dissolve into the brilliance of the earth’s awakened consciousness. 

Now I offer my trauma to the earth, the lived record of surviving the carceral state. The earth does not know what the carceral state is, but to return to the earth in this moment is to know what it means to be free because I will know what it means to be held and cared for. The earth asks me to surrender this suffering. It teaches me to let go as it shows me that there is no energy too strong for it to hold and tend to.

The earth asks me what else I need, and I allow my body to answer in sensation. What my body needs now is to be held by the earth. And as the earth holds me, it radiates the energy of its awakened care back up through my roots and directly into my body. I am being filled with this energy of care, flooded and saturated, healed and freed all the way down to my DNA and through my line of ancestors. 

I am slowly dissolving into this profound care.

Slowly, I arise as wind, as energy in movement, as air swirling and expanding. My breath is the wind. When I am breathing, I am feeling the pulsating passion of wind in my body, gathering the vital resources of oxygen and awareness, depositing precious elements in my cells and molecules. In the exhale the earth takes what I no longer need, like carbon, and makes it an offering to plant siblings. In this state, the wind can teach us how to listen to it.

Listening to the Wind

I enjoy listening to the wind. Not only can the wind transmit data, it can also be deeply relaxing.

To begin, on a windy day, go outside and sit or lie down on the ground or sit in a chair with your feet touching the ground. You must touch the earth and notice it beneath you. Feel the Mother under you rising to hold you and allow her to stabilize you. 

Then shift your attention to the wind, its movement of twisting and dancing, its fluid flow and forceful gait. Let the wind touch you. Feel the wind caress your exposed skin and ruffle your clothing. Let the rising of the earth and the sensation of wind touching you fill your attention until your attention collapses and spills out into awareness. Allow your awareness to consume the wind, and allow the wind to consume your awareness. 

What is arising in your awareness? What is being asked? What is being offered? Pay attention.

When transmission feels complete, offer prayers into the wind as you would cast flowers out onto the ocean. Let the wind catch and lift this energy of aspiration up into itself.

Now offer your own needs to the wind. Pray to the wind. What do you need? What must happen? When your transmission is complete, offer gratitude and feel the wind swell with your care for it. 

Lama Rod Owens is an authorized lama in the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism with a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard. He is the coauthor of Radical Dharma and author of Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger. He is the co-founder of Bhumisparsha, a Buddhist spiritual community, and has a gift for reaching diverse audiences with transformative wisdom. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. For more, see lamarod.com.