Where Do You Touch Grass?
If you aren't laying plans for it, the grass will keep retreating from your life.
Dear Reader,
The next chapter of Cabin Confidential is in the works. It is under my spell and I am under it.
Today, I give you some cabin-like thinking. A short read since I am off to participate in the first ever Yoga in The Ruins morning.
Go Touch Grass.
It sounds like a nice invitation.
But in reality, it’s become an internet meme meant for shaming people who have become lost in the wilderness of online life.
If someone tells you to go touch grass, you have maybe been a bit too much about something. Or maybe you have lost perspective. Politics, gaming culture, toxic Facebooking. There are ten million ways to forget to touch grass.
Touching grass overlaps with the less sarcastic term of grounding.
To ground is to simply touch your skin to the earth and invite its electron flow, its energy, into your body. It’s a fancy word for just going barefoot. Leave it to humans to complicate and over explain something we have been doing quite naturally from the beginning.
But, I take that back. Because it has become complicated.
Because the online world has been sprouting up between every crack and fissure in our lives. It is systematically separating us from being present on the earth. Like that week in late May when you can feel the weeds growing overnight, every night, and you despair of ever catching up with them. Insidious bits of code that insert themselves into our homes, our cars, our phones, our very inner monologues.
There. Is. No. Escape.
But… there are moments of escape. I think that is the key to touching grass. Reminding ourselves to take the moments. To carve out the small pieces of time away from the screens.
I invite you to embrace this bit of grass from our fields at Cabin Confidential, while also understanding the irony of watching it through your screen.
Today, I hope you find a moment between your online time to rest your eyes, your hands, your feet, on something real. The dirt of a raised garden bed? A city park? A bike trail? Take off your shoes. Feel the mud of a river bank. Hug a tree?
The longer we survive in the virtual, the more important the real life experiences will become.
In keeping with this subject, I recently took some time to update the ABOUT page for The Ruins Substack. I am hoping it will help newcomers understand the philosophy of our sometimes complicated mosaic museum in the woods. Please share your thoughts in the comments, as someone who already understands it, about how it feels to read it.
Oh! And please share your favorite places to touch grass.
Thank you for being here, helping me dig for optimism.
I miss grass! I moved to the south end of the Las Vegas valley 2 and a half years ago from lush green grassy central Texas. I miss grass and am tired of tiny rocks in all the yards. Except Miss Lottie down the street who planted REAL grass in a section of her sloping front yard. She told me I could bring my dogs and sit in her front yard any time. What an oasis! That is where I touch grass at 5:30am when it is still cool. Can’t do that later in the day since our temps are up to 110 degrees. But that morning grass is a luxury!
My absolute favorite place to touch grass is at the country “Somewhere Texas” which is the title of this mosaic done and a simple memorial day weekend workshop with Ariana Gallo and Anita Pillotti