Buried to Life

Hello, Dear Ones. I spent the last days of 2024 participating in an online vipassana retreat. It’s a wonderful practice, and every time I take part in one of these retreats, I remember that it is not what I need for my main practice. I find it almost too sterile, and I long for the mess and abandon of dance or song or some other wonderful, careening engagement with the divine.

Still, insight comes, and I am grateful for it. Today’s draft came first as an image on the last day of the retreat. It is, as are most of my favorite things, messy.

The feeling I had on the last day of retreat --

something so messy, so unlike the clean in-and-out breath of vipassana --

was the feeling of being buried -- not alive,

as in, to wait for death, rather --

buried to life.

One cheek resting on the damp winter soil

both arms sunk into the earth up to my shoulders

fingers grasping for the seeds I know are mine,

hair falling softly over my face

winding together with the surface roots.

I rest here,

the pillow of the soil under my cheek,

woven net of hair and foliage

holding me in place.

It looks like stillness. It looks, maybe, like death.

The tiny rumblings of my one trillion cells and

the tiny rumblings of the infinite earth parts

know different.

Here is the beginning

of the great open Everything,

the quiet before I burst upon the world

like a thunderstorm,

like the sharp-edged petrichor underneath the washed-clean sky.