I love earthly things.
While my life led me eventually to all things spiritual, the more spiritual the direction things appear to take, the more I’m brought solidly back to the realm of earthly, earthy things.
Which suits me just fine.
I grew up with parents who loved wild things. Though perhaps very much via circumscribed understandings and experiences on their part (or maybe not), my parents exposed me to wild places and creatures. We camper-trekked to Fallen Leaf Lake almost every summer of my childhood, where my mother would sit alone in a meadow reading and watching birds each morning, and where I rambled through forests and perched on mossy boulders, absorbed in all ways in a stream for hours on end. I was allowed to solo-roam the dry hillsides near our home, observed only by cows, climbing oaks and laying on my back considering the sky. Our backyard bloomed with plants and flowers of all kinds, meticulously tended by both my parents. In the center, reaching up past the power lines, grew a beloved avocado tree we ceremoniously planted in the near-middle of the lawn. My chickens scratched around a retaining wall easement where I spent hundreds of hours just sitting with them. From my upstairs bedroom, I spent at least as much time alone (not really alone—surrounded by stuffed animals), happily reading and spying on birds and whatever creatures happened into our backyard. Our family regularly tripped to adjacent states and periodically ventured further. And on and on.
I consider this a most fortunate of childhoods.
My childhood infused me with dirt, trees, lichen, the birds my mother loved, fish my dad and I would catch and return to the river at my tearful insistence, bugs and creatures of all sorts. Thank God. It is this wild life that not only inspires and recharges me, but connects me most deeply to everything I find True. Is what I find true. What is meaningful, and quite simply, who I am.
“Who I am” became, over the years for me, a complex understanding seeming to settle out with some degree of consistency over the past decade into a dualistic-encompassed-in-the-non-nondual “persona” and “infinite beingness” (the persona being the vehicle for experience and the infinite beingness being the all-one one who experiences). But, perhaps as important as this spiritual understanding may be to even the everyday minutia of my life, this is, at least in the human brain, an idea, a concept understood by the mind.