#128 | Putting feet on earth

Why Grounding Is Good For Your Soul

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf

"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Find some bare earth or a grassy verge. Don’t get precious, even Haggerston Park is okay. The strip of council-mown lawn between the A40 and your council estate will work.

If there is a view, face it.

Empty your pockets of anything mechanical. Put your phone in your bag, and take off your watch. Unplug for the moment. Then take your shoes off and then your socks.

Finally, stand still, look up, and you’ll feel the urge to sigh. Sigh away.

Embrace the stillness.

The emptiness.

The quiet.

Stretch those arms up.

The earth against your heels.

Feel the grass between your toes.

And be quiet.

In a couple of minutes, you’ll feel the release. Suddenly you’ll start seeing again. The detailing around the dormer windows across the park. A branch or trunk. Shadows. The spire in the distance and then the Shard beyond. The clouds will come into focus. You’ll arrive.

With your sight restored, you’ll start to hear. Listen to the movement of London. The overground, the cars, a bird if you’re lucky. Kids playing, couples flirting.

We live with 14mm of rubber between us and nature. Under our Adidas, there’s tarmac, or perhaps lino, tiles, carpet. Escalators, then stairs, long concrete corridors with joists and insulation. Floors of buildings, people and paper and sewage systems. And under it all, mother earth, crumbling and full of worms. Buried.

Closing the human-nature gap is both romantic and gratifying. We have a pre-historic need to bridge the growing divide between ourselves and nature. The curse of living in a city is our dislocation from everything natural. How can days pass when we have hardly tasted fresh air, let alone got muddy?

We grow up thinking nature is the ‘other’, outside ourselves, beyond the human frontier. But we are nature; nature is us. Her absence is our absence. The human-nature gap splits us in two. The fact that grounding is even an activity is tragic, but we are where we are! Through grounding (or earthing), we fleetingly connect to our nature.

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My week in books

It’s not out there it’s here by Danapriya. Nourishing! Thanks to Hec H, this is easy to read and spiritually fulfilling.

“Looking honestly inside ourselves, on close inspection we will find that we are much better than we think, and also much worse.” — resonated.

Chess Story by Stefan Zweig. Excellent short novel about a genius (and personally flawed) monomaniac chess master.

“All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.”

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Live well,

Hector

PS. Please me your grounding pics!