Feeling The Earth

A brush with nature for day one of 2024

Last month during an online book discussion group our talk turned to rituals and such. I mentioned my plans to make my Solstice Tree, and another person said she’d heard of someone doing a daily practice for the year of putting one’s hands on the earth each day of the year. I’m eager to be more connected to earth and sky and to other people this year. Today I stepped out into the yard and put my hands into the very chilly and damp grass and let myself feel the earth. It’s truly winter now, and there’s a feeling of my growing things I’ve curated in my yard and garden being totally dormant. The sense of things dying off makes winter depressing for some people. It can be a season of sadness, and the echoes of grief. But feeling the grass and moving my fingers in the dampness gave me the sense of the living layers of nature. So there we go, day one of feeling the earth. 

While I was out there I was listening to a huge Murder of Crows in the farthest field behind us.  The crows have been roosting there at the end of the day for about a week now, and glean along the rows of the cut field by the dozens. They speckle the branches of the trees by the hundreds like a winter surprise of leaves, all in black. When a bunch of them shift, the sound - a “crowcophany” perhaps? - is noise and call and swirl and rise.  

Also in the distance I saw seven of the herd of deer that are sometimes behind us. I say sometimes because I used to see more than 25 of them at a time, but in the last year my sightings and the number of deer have dwindled. 18 months ago a small woods was clear cut across from the elementary school a quarter mile from our yard. Now what’s growing there is a cul-de-sac of townhomes. My heart continues to break for all the creatures who made their homes there, and I’m fairly sure that the loss of the woodland to our south is the reason my herd isn’t as present in the fields I love to watch. 

My wall garden I have let go to seed this year, not by plan but from lack of motivation and then an interest in how it changes without my intervention. Much of the dead parts are the remains of unwelcome volunteers, grasses and weeds, who ran a bit wilder than usual this year. There I found a single long stalk of grass with a bristle at the end, a smaller one below it, and then a curlicue of a leaf. I brought it inside to feel the bristles and enjoy the tan stalk.  The curly leaf was bestowed upon our big black cat, B.P., who found it fascinating and, I’m sure, tasty.

Nature, connection, the beauty that needs no words.  

Welcome, 2024, may I make the most of you in small ways and on as many levels as possible.