Mother Earth: Where Infinite Love Blooms and Dances

Earth Day. I’m in my Zoom Dance Chapel, where a tectonic shift occurs in me. Why am I surprised? I often gain clarity as I regroup body and soul and dance. Of course, I’m not unique. Entire cultures claim dance as the center of their cultural wealth.

The Monday Dance Chapel on Zoom is my hidden monastery, a community portal, a ritual space where small groups of people light a candle, offer intentions, and warm up with music—nothing fancy—just moving to welcome bones, neuro-pathways, breath, and heartbeats. As we give ourselves space and time to open and bloom, no one looks at anyone, though we feel ourselves dancing side by side. That really helps as it’s hard, if not impossible, to arrive in the Big Dance, relying only on one’s self.

I read June Goudey’s poem to the group…

Moon and sun circle our lives, like birds eying the landscape below.
Each day we rise and fall, shift and turn; and always sun and moon enfold our living. June Goudey

Then, I improvisationally gathered some thoughts in preparation for an Earth Day meditation.

English language distorts our consciousness with articles, pre-possessive pronouns, and prepositions that infer that bodies are here ON Earth, not Earth Herself. English speakers say “my body” and “our body” not knowing we perpetuate the false belief that “body” belongs to us. Rather, bodily truth, wisdom and beauty rise as Earth. We are We-bodies, Earth’s bodies.

Taking this a step further, I believe that Earth grants pain to guide us back into harmony. Death Herself is Earth calling us home.

I put on music while we took time to dance, rest, draw, write, and fall home into Earth. As I fell, Earth danced me as she often does. Except this time, I heard my soul ask, “What, Earth, do you want me to do?”

“What does Earth want me to do today?”

How had I never asked this question?

Devotion ignited that is usually reserved for Divinity. Earth’s intimacy rose like a bloom, giving me her warmth, tenderness, and strength. I was dancing Earth. Devoted. Listening.

Relief was immediate.

What if I didn’t treat life like a gargantuan menu full of thousands of individualistic choices that incite me to scurry about my imagination and days, consuming and questing?

I feel tenderized, teary eyed to feel Earth re-compass me. “What does Earth want me to do today?”

The last week fed me morsels of affirmation like those below.

John O’Donohue wrote,

Concealed beneath familiarity and silence, the earth holds back and it never occurs to us to wonder how the earth sees us. Is it not possible that a place could have huge affection for those who dwell there? Perhaps your place loves having you there. It misses you when you are away and in its secret way rejoices when you return. Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That it could sense your presence and feel the care you intend towards it? Perhaps your favorite place feels proud of you. We tend to think of death as a return to clay, a victory for nature. But maybe it is the converse: that when you die, our native place will fill with sorrow. It will miss your voice, your breath and the bright waves of your thought, how you walked through the light and brought news of other places.

This brilliant film Rewilding A Forest with Artist and Poet Maria "Vildhjärta" Westerberg who gathered me into her wisdom about art, depression, and forest healing.

I take to heart what James Robert says in his Into the Deep Woods substack, “What we’ve learned in recent years is that facts can be shaped to fit ideologies and that failures are blunted, erased even, when they can be blamed on others. My sense for a long time has been that we’re not going to think our way out of the multiple environmental crises we’re embroiled in. It requires soul work. Perhaps we need to rediscover a sense of the sacred.”

If you’d like to join my dance chapel some Monday, email me at cynthiawintonhenry@gmail.com. I’ll open the door for you.

Cynthia