Honoring my creative lineage: Earth. Soil. Soul. Seed

This month, I will write a series of vignettes and poems honoring my creative lineage, which includes the people and forces that have shaped me, prayed for me and dreamed me into being, so that I may walk my own empowered path guided by them and the gifts they shared with me. 

Earth. Soil. Soul. Seed

Photo by Neil Carpenter

The older I get, the more I feel this tangible connection to land and all her children. I stand today with the knowing that I belong here, that I am a child of the Earth. And the more I feel connected to this land, the more I feel a sadness and severing from the land where I was born, where my ancestors tended the soil and lived humbly with the seasons.

This sadness needs to be tended to so that pain doesn’t seep deeper into my soul. 

I remember a few years ago, I started to notice an anxiety start to rise in me around late Autumn. There was definite grief there but there was mostly fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of uncertainty. It felt ancestral, like my body was preparing for the long cold winter night but maybe I was scared to not have enough provisions to last the season. There was a feeling of dread, of near panic that I had to hold with breath and hands and faith.

The bare trees in the park would remind me that it was ok to be vulnerable and uncovered. I was asked to face my most intimate self and it was so uncomfortable. And then the sprouts would break through the soil and I would feel this palpable shift in the Earth and in my body - we were connected - the Earth was speaking to me and reminding me to move, to shift, to welcome a new phase of life into being.

The image of the seed rising toward the light, of moving against gravity and piercing the layer of soil to express its natural tendency for growth and activation started to show up in my writing. I wrote a story about it or rather I channeled it from Spirit. 

Photo by Neil Carpenter

The seed was speaking to my soul or my soul was speaking to my seed. I felt aligned with the Earth in a new and exciting way. Our bodies were connected beyond the physical. There was a portal to the Divine that I could access through this physical world, through the changes I was seeing outside and inside of me. 

The Earth has been my home and the home of my ancestors, filling our life with seeds of her creation and feeding us with the abundance of that offering. She has held and supported the many steps I’ve taken and has provided a portal to more intimate parts of my being and sensing Self. Our evolving relationship eventually brought me to work with another incredible medium: compost which has changed my life in profound ways; I’ll cover compost in another post.

Photo by Alexis Holloway

The circle is never broken when reciprocal relationships are honored, when you sit with the mystery and potential of what being a Human can be.

Thank you Mother Earth.

Thank you Soil.

Thank you Soul.

Thank you Seed.

Your many gifts guide me and continue to feed my heart.