What Grounds Us?

Each fall, as the leaves begin to swirl on the wind, I inevitably notice how my own life feels like that swirl of leaves- whether it’s helping kids on their back to school journey, getting the church ready for our year together, or the seasonal chores of preparing for winter, I feel like I’m trying to catch and organize the endless leaves falling from the trees. (in my neighborhood right now it’s just the honey locust letting down its tiny yellow leaves, but we know what’s coming). Sometimes the events of the world have me feeling like a leaf fallen in a raging river after a storm. 

Any spiritual tradition worth its salt will have ways to help us deal with us. In the Pagan and wiccan traditions, this is called grounding. Grounding helps us feel less like a leaf on the wind, and more like a strong tree with our roots deep in the ground. If you’ve been coming to this church for a while, you will remember times when you’ve been encouraged to imagine yourself like a tree, feeling the ground beneath your feet, imagining growing roots deep into the ground. Most earth centered rituals will include a time of imagining and feeling our deep connection to the earth. 

There are lots of good reasons to do this, but one is to help us keep our connection to the material world when starting a ritual or spiritual practice. It’s easy when feeling energy move, feeling spirit move, extending ourselves into imagination and vision to lose track of what is real. UUs have historically grounded our faith in the practice of science, our relationships to one another and the earth, our work for justice, and service to those most at risk. 

Grounding has practical applications in other parts of life as well. Have you ever had a great idea, and then when you went to try to make it happen, it just didn’t work? I know I have. For example, I had this romantic idea that on my last sabbatical I was going to walk the Camino Real – like our member Aurelio Catano and some of my clergy friends have done. Then I started walking, getting in shape for it, and quickly realized that I was nowhere close to the mileage the other pilgrims would be walking. Turns out my body had changed while I wasn’t paying attention. That’s a plan that was not grounded in the reality of what my body was capable of. 

In the past year or so, when so much is in flux, when so many people and pillars of our society are at risk, we have talked frequently about grounding our actions in our values and principles. There are lots of forces in the world “moving quickly and breaking things” energies organized around pursuing profit or power, or just the confusing currents of a society that is ungrounded in compassion and ethics. Sometimes I notice myself carried along by the flow as the swirl of our fast-moving times like that little leaf, caught up in the current of modern life. As I go through my daily life, I see the increased single use plastic wrapped around the things I need, I hear the struggles of people trying to navigate our broken health care system. I see the impacts our global climate change is already having in fires and floods and storms. I can’t hear a story about ICE on the news without tearing up and feeling helpless. I feel how small my power to impact such strong currents. It would be easy to just let the current carry me where it will. But when I ground myself in my values, I see choices every day I can make that grow out of those values. I still compost my food scraps, feed people in the community, give to organizations who have more power to manifest those values. I can stand by family and friends when they need me. I’m sure each of us has different ways we live our values every day, and it’s okay that those are different- we can’t all do it all, and “plurality” is one of our values. (although I hope we are all going to get out and vote in November!) 

Not only do those things make a difference in the world, even if it’s only to a few folks nearby, but they make a difference in me. Every time I do something to live out one of my values, it strengthens that capacity in me, it strengthens my sense that I know who I am. Though I can’t always be the person I want to be, I can always try, I can always return when I stray. I imagine that through those actions, I build up a sense of personal integrity in myself like a solid core, that helps me feel like one cohesive Self, rather than a thousand drifting leaves. 

This summer I was privileged to attend a concert by Rhiannan Giddens, Grammy and Pulitzer prize willing singer, songwriter, musician, who started her career recording and performing the old songs of the African diaspora. I saw her on the Grandstand at the Grassroots festival, and I’ll tell you The crowd was a little unsettled at the start, like maybe a lot of folks hadn’t heard her before and didn’t know what to expect. Maybe they weren’t expecting the songs of enslaved people, as she offered music that black Americans would have been singing 250 years ago. Maybe they weren’t expecting her to mention race and hard things like that. But she is a skillful performer and storyteller, and she and the other musicians in the band were so gifted, that no one could resist the rhythm and soon everyone was dancing. At the very end of the show, she said we were going to do a sing along song, and was worried- would people join in? but she explained that this was a song that had been sung in the civil rights movement, but had a long history in the union movement, was sung in Spanish by independence movements in Chile and Spain and had been a spiritual before that. As she began to sing “We Shall Not Be Moved” 

I had the strong sensation of all these hundreds of people connected through the music, like literal grass roots, the strength of that connection, to neighbors, to place. It felt like we were all part of a giant tree -- that trunk being integrity, a core strength like a tall strong Maple. I could feel the strength of our unity in song, could imagine -- this is how, together, we would resist fascism, would resist forces of oppression. Like the wide complex roots of a giant old tree, connecting to earth, to other living beings --like mycelium, like other trees -- supporting and nourishing that strong core that resists all the storms and the seasons. This is grounding indeed- the feeling that we know who we are and where we are, and though the winds blow, we will not be moved.

These lyrics reference the scriptures, as so many spirituals do:

Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, for he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit. — Jeremiah 17:8

And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. — Psalm 1:3

It’s important that this tree is planted by the waters- to me this reminds us that we are grounded in something larger than ourselves- grounded in our connection to the spirit of life, connected to the living waters. It is not through our own will that we stand, but through our connection to that which is larger than ourselves. We Unitarian Universalists are a diverse group in terms of what we believe, some of us believe in a higher power, some do not, and others aren’t sure. But none of us can be like that strong tree alone, we connect to the source, we connect to the web of life, we connect to one another, to the ancestors who came before us, we strengthen how we live out our values, which strengthens our integrity, our strong trunk. This is how we weather the storms, this is how we become the people we most want to be, this is how flourish together.