EMBODIED ECOLOGIES

Dear Candice, Christa, and Jane,

If you are here, that means you opened your box. Hooray! I hope the contents survived the journey across cities and towns to reach each of you unshattered.

This project is called GROUNDiNg. Here are your instructions:

  1. The box contains a glass vial with a strand of vegan leather tied around it’s neck. Remove the black tape from the top of the vial, and hang it around YOUR neck. Adjust the knot so that the vial sits comfortably on your body, in whatever way feels right.

  2. Inside the vial is a sample of my ecosystem: earth and moss from outside my door, scooped from the bass of the Black Locust trees that sway in the winds above my head. I invite you to spend some time with my ecosystem on your body.

  3. When you are ready, please add something from YOUR ecosystem to this vial, something that you face or feel or, simply something that supports you. It could be a breath, or a paper, a crumb, a spittle, a pill… (Scroll to the bottom of this page to read David Whyte’s description of the word GROUND).

  4. When you are done (this could take 1 day or 1 week), mail this vial using the address label in your envelope. Use the same packaging and the enclosed stamp.

  5. When you receive the next package, repeat steps 1-3.

  6. Keep this vial as your own.

GROUND

…is what lies beneath our feet. It is the place where we already stand; a state of recognition, the place or the circumstances to which we belong whether we wish to or not. It is what holds and supports us, but also what we do not want to be true; it is what chal­lenges us, physically or psychologically, irrespective of our hoped for needs. It is the living, underlying foun­dation that tells us what we are, where we are, what season we are in and what, no matter what we wish in the abstract, is about to happen in our body, in the world or in the conversation between the two.

To come to ground is to find a home in circumstances and in the very physical body we inhabit in the midst of those circumstances and above all to face the truth, no matter how difficult that truth may be; to come: to ground is to begin the courageous conversation, to step into difficulty and by taking that first step, begin the movement through all difficulties, to find the sup­port and foundation that has been beneath our feet all along: a place to step onto, a place on which to stand and a place from which to step.

-David Whyte Consolations