Writing with music experiment (**new music begins)

**A thickly woven tapestry was wrapped around her, as she sat alone in darkened room, contemplating the complexity of her situation. One inner voice spoke in an imploring mode, asking – “What will I do? What? What? Why is it this way? Why? Why? “ Another voice, somewhat playfully sang a lilting song in the background, relieving and hopeful. **

She walked outside into the sunlight, warmed by the orb blazing in a clear sky. Here she could shed the heavy wrap and the many voices. Now she felt the sun on her skin, the fresh air on her face, the ground under her bare feet. She smelled the spring fragrances of blooms, opening up, as she was, to a new season.

A smile began to play on her face. Her heart was beating calmly and steadily. Two bunnies chased each other in the grass, touching noses, then, chasing some more, leaping up in the air as though on springs. Their courting antics heartened her. She couldn’t help but laugh at them. And herself. Laugh at the folly of being human and trying so hard ** when the nature of life was still continuing. Yes, her troubles were still there, somewhere. But as Bobby McFerren says – “Into every life there comes some trouble, But when you worry, you make it double.”

She was renewed by Mother Nature, knowing she was part of the community of beings and the cycles of life. She felt strengthened and able to deal with her challenges, without magnifying them in her mind. **

Om shanti shanti shantihi

She sat under a blossoming tree and drank in the happy complexities of the world, ** letting the bliss of being arise inside of her heart, washing her aura with waves of fullness and emptiness.

So she sat for a timeless time.

Finally, glowing with prana, she slowly walked back to her inner sanctum.
--Terra Rafael

Essay - True Groundedness

Scientists have learned how to trace where a person has lived by analyzing the constituents of their bones. People really are a part of the land. The plants grow up out of the soil, capturing its nutrients. They marry them in their metabolism with the rain and the sun into life. Then we devour and digest that life, directly, or through the intermediary of animal flesh, and make it into our own living bodies.

I doubt, though, that this tracing technique would work for modern Americans. We import our food so that we can eat in perpetual harvest time. Our food is no more indigenous than we are. And visa versa.

Consider the power in eating only food grown nearby. What if, for generations, we had lived on the same land, cultivating it, gathering from it, and then, finally, planting our own spent bodies back into it? Our ancestors would not just be a litany of names and dates, arranged on a piece of paper, in a family tree. They would actually be living in our physical forms. Our genetic heritage would be fleshed out with the same raw materials that had cycled through our ancestors' bodies. What true groundedness that would be!

No wonder that indigenous people know that we do not own the land. And that the land is the matrix of our truest heritage.

By Terra Rafael