Touching the Earth... in various ways.

As usual, my wife did something that sparked me to do something that I'd been thinking of doing for a while and hadn't ever done.

She wrote something.

It was introspective, brilliant, thoughtful, and made me feel like a weirdo.

Which is just how I like it.

While I naturally encourage you to go read your blog yourself, as her thoughts are radiant, I will touch upon them in my own work below, with my own thoughts and my own personal twists on the concept of Touching the Earth.  In Buddhism, there are postures that display an idea, or an intent, or a thought.  These postures are called mudras, and the one she is referencing in her thoughts is named Touching the Earth.  I'll quote her own words below, because I don't want to screw anything up:

When reading about Zazen Buddhism, and other theological facets of the Buddhist philosophy, the Earth Witness posture you see above is the one that has stuck with me the most inside of my mind.  It is the posture where The Buddha resisted temptation and touched the Earth for confirmation.  The varying stories are many, but the overall result is the same.  Siddhartha Guatama sat under the Bodhi Tree and reached out to touch the Earth.  He felt in tune with the present and the World.  Under his fingertips there was the flux, the impermanence and the passing of time but he accepted these things and felt also the connectivity to all living things. It was here he remained steadfast and aware by reaching out for the Earth when he needed affirmation.  It was here he became the Buddha.

For some of us it is the spray of the sea on our skin, for others it is when the wind's fingertips brush through our hair, and for others still it is the mud between their toes and leaves tumbling past their face.  For me something inside swells the strongest when I turn my gaze up and watch the stars burn or the moon's pockmarked face glow.  When we give our mutual home a moment we can still feel it reach out to touch back and give us that same affirmation and comfort that the Buddha once sought.

As she said, for some of us, it is the spray of the sea on our skin.  For others, it is something different.

For me, it is something bizarre.

Since I was a little kid, I have been experiencing something like this when certain things happen, or when I do certain things, and I've never had the presence of mind to really think much more about it other than "Wow, that's really awesome, and really weird.  I wonder why the hell I react like that."  I've given it a lot, and I mean a lot, of thought through the years, but I've never come up with an answer.  It's not like the times I originally experienced these sensations was linked to any certain important event in my life.  They just kind of happen.  But it's like science... they ALWAYS happen.  There's no times where they don't.

The only thing I can really do to give you an idea of how I feel when it occurs is that whatever it is that I experience makes my very bones sing.  It seems to be a vibration that starts somewhere deep within my nature, not just my body, but my psyche.  This vibration thrums its way through my essence and then begins to shake my foundations, and before I know it, I can feel my own bones quivering.  My hands sometimes shake ever so slightly, and I usually tear up.

My first thoughts towards this during my youth made me wonder if I was tied into some sort of super-consciousness.  If I was part of a hivemind thing, and I was drawing on someone else's experiences and emotions for this to happen to me... because there simply was no reason for it.  I also considered the idea that I might somehow be centering or channeling my own inner energy for some unknown reason, to some unknown destination.  And it happened in the most bizarre ways.

This song, for instance:

There's no scientific reason for it.  There's no reason at all for it.  But every damn time I hear this song, I feel a very strong rush of energy and sometimes I will even start to tear up.  I want to scream, I want to run, I want to leap from a rooftop and swing from the moon.  I want to kamehameha everything that is bad in my life straight into the center of the Sun, and I feel like, at that very moment, that I'm in every way capable of doing just that.  I've never understood it.

The same thing with the ending of the book Neuromancer, by William Gibson.  Every single time I've read it, when I get to that last page, and that very, very last line... I feel it.  My eyes cloud up, I have to close them, my breathing seems to stop and I wonder why it suddenly feels like I'm the one riding Kuang Mark 11 into the depths of Tessier-Ashpool like Case did in the book.  I've never understood it.

These are things I've always wondered about.  And these are things that my wife, in all her brilliance, explained to me today without even trying.  Something I've wondered about since I was fucking 15 years old... done in one fell swoop of her keys.  Without her even trying.  How she did this, I will never understand.

I've been Touching the Earth all this time, in ways so strange that the Buddha would likely laugh.  I always used to instinctively take the feeling and do something with it, I've done this for years, whenever I feel that singing I always pull up a project that I'm working on and focus my thoughts towards it.  Usually I am able to come through with some sort of idea on where to take it or what to do with it that I'd never thought of before.

I thought it was my own little muse ticking away... but it was the Buddha, sitting there calmly, reminding me that a foundation is the thing all things spring from.  That the Earth is always there for you, and you should always be there for it, no matter where life takes you.  Even if it manifests itself in some weird ass Brother 3 kind of way, the Earth will always remind you that you, at your very essence, are made of starstuff.

This I understand.