Welcome.
Please go ahead and begin to settle in.
Let your eyes fall shut.
We want to begin with a sense of our own gravity,
Our own deep connection to the earth.
So for the next minute or so,
Follow your breath and let its natural cadence pull you more deeply into awareness of your body,
Of the moment,
Of this moment that you've chosen to stop and be nowhere else but here and now.
As you follow your breathing,
I'll read you the words of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.
These are words that will guide our practice today.
Breathing with awareness,
See if you can have a sense of breathing in the words of the poem itself.
How surely gravity's law,
Strong as an ocean current,
Takes hold of the smallest thing and pulls it toward the heart of the earth.
Each thing,
Each stone,
Blossom,
Child is held in place.
Only we in our arrogance push out beyond that what we each belong to for some empty freedom.
If we surrender to Earth's intelligence,
We could rise up rooted like trees.
Instead,
We entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle lonely and confused.
So,
Like children,
We begin again to learn from the things because they are in the heart of God.
They have never left him.
This is what things can teach us to fall patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that before it can fly.
How we experience that now.
Begin simply by feeling a place your feet connect with the floor and through it connect with the earth.
We're feeling a pull right through the soles of our feet,
Deep to the center of the earth,
Gravity.
Feel it as a heaviness.
Feel it as a calling,
Moving toward the heart of the world,
Heart of the earth.
Feel this downward pull also through your spine and torso,
The weight that keeps you seated.
But now experience it as the call of gravity,
Keeping you here,
Embracing you,
Part of her own.
Feel it through your body from the top of your head all the way down through your spine.
This pull toward the heart of the earth,
Heart of the world,
Calling you home.
Notice where your hands and arms rest.
Notice their solidity.
Feel their weight.
Again,
Noticing the downward pull,
Pull toward the heart of the earth,
Heart of the world.
And now turn attention to your heart.
Put a hand on your heart and feel it beating there so faithfully.
And as you breathe,
See if you can feel or imagine a sense of earth herself breathing in time with you so deeply are we woven together.
And perhaps you can feel it as a gentle beckoning or calling.
Come home to me.
Come home to this moment.
Remember who you are.
Our bodies know this connection.
They've never lost it.
Let's rest for a moment in this longing,
Longing to give up the sense of separateness and come home to rest to remember Earth wisdom to know yourself safe,
Complete,
Deeply seen and known.
The sense of all loved hearts beating together,
Feeling yourself resting in this moment in the heart of the earth,
Heart of the world,
Connected by gravity.
And Earth has a language which we know for we are creatures of earth,
Creatures of play.
We cannot separate ourselves from this language.
And we can begin again and learn.
We can remember.
As the poet said,
So like children we begin again to learn from the things because they are in God's heart.
They have never left him.
So will you bring yourself imaginely into your body as a child,
Any age that feels like a time when you still remember this connection,
Were more in your body and less in your thoughts.
Let this young child guide you through a stroll in nature to some beautiful place.
That child is comfortable in this solitude,
Comfortable with themselves,
With all things earth.
They are not separate,
But still in deep conversation with the world and the world of imagination.
There is little fear in this child's soul.
And now will you as a child,
Choose one friend among the many wonders of the natural world,
A brook,
A flower,
A cloud,
An insect,
An animal,
And converse with it.
For at this age you've not yet forgotten your first language,
Your birth language,
The language of the earth,
Our native tongue.
And for the next minute of clock time,
Learn from this teacher and friend,
Perhaps without words,
Immersing yourself in it,
Being one with it.
Like Einstein who imagined himself riding on a ray of light as he began to realize his theory of relativity,
Immerse,
Receive.
And again,
The words of the poet.
This is what the things can teach us to fall patiently to trust our heaviness.
This is what things can teach us to fall patiently to trust our heaviness.
We start to close our journey by remembering our heaviness,
Letting ourselves rest here in the heart,
Pulled and held by gravity's pull,
Always closer to the heart of everything.
Feeling and trusting our weight,
Feeling and trusting our rightness in this world,
Relaxing and resting here and now,
Cradled by Earth herself,
Held by gravity.
We are feeling an intention here to remember and return to this connection again and again as our day continues.
And so it is.
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