Earth's the Right Place

Dear All,

We're lingering for another week on the solidity of the earth.  Light, air, water, are all quasi-continuums, enlivened by quite subtle inner demarcations.  Earth on the other hand, with its metal, stone, gems, mountains, heaps of shale, is the realm of definite edges and limits: the plain hits up against the hill; the river rives the field; the cliff shoots down to the beach below where stones clatter up and back, contradicting the ambivalent waves.  Ground retorts to sky.  You stamp on the earth.

Earth's the right place for love just because of the "considerations" Frost complains of in his poem, where the world seems to lash out at us, confronting us with a hardness.   Cultures in the ancient world were renewed at ports: those clashing nodes of languages and goods and peoples.  Something can happen, not destroying differences but subsuming them, where the otherness may feel impossible to bridge.  Spangler quotes a friend as saying, "When you love, God erupts at the edge where you engage with another."

How could we learn to perceive, collaborate, forgive, invent, love, and erupt, except on a firm earth of differences and edges?  So our meditation sentence for next Tuesday will be: 
 

Earth's the right place for love.

all blessings to all,

Michael