on Erosion and Deep Foundations
Sunflower growing through a simple slab on grade. The ultimate in shallow foundations.
My healing path looks an awful lot like the slow removal of the dirt and stuff over which I’ve built my full understanding of who I am. Talk about scary as duck.
Irony runs high this morning. While showering, I contemplated my last dream set of the morning - the only one I could remember. By the time the water hit my head, only a bit of it had lingered. Erosion. Yeah, I had a dream about erosion. Though a weird topic, I started thinking about what’s eroding underneath me. What thoughts and ideas, and beliefs that I’d built the idea of who I needed to be were finding themselves washed away a little at a time.
That’s the thing about erosion; it happens a grain or six at a time. I’m fabulous at ignoring the slow progress of change caused by everyday erosion. I even have systems in place to reshore when things are looking grim.
This thing happens when you’re healing, though - sometimes we sluff off a medium size chunk that, through the magic of geometry and gravity, was holding a ton of stuff in place. When that piece - say, a false core belief about you being stupid - gets plucked from its spot, way more of the grit holding up our ideas and beliefs goes with it. Those neighbors can leave simultaneously or hold on for a bit but eventually get carried away.
For me, that’s what healing looks like: the slow wearing away of the ground on which I’ve built my identity.
My inner engineer freaks out. We are qualified to design shallow foundations, but we never had to do the deep ones. Deep foundations allow the dirt and crap at the top to move about and even disappear because they don’t rely on their presence to hold up the structure.
The shower-induced lightbulb was that those deep foundations are already there. I grew up so used to seeing what I could see that I missed the ties to nature, the relations between people, and the connection to Mother Earth. My spirituality, the belief that the Divine resides in me and so I’m connected to everyone and everything, provides the piles that travel deep into the earth to ground me and give me something resistant to erosion to stand on.
The connection to the Divine exists even if I do nothing to nurture it. That comforts me. There’s no earning, there’s nobody being disappointed in me, there’s evaluation of **if** anyone is worthy of being included in the club. The Divine is in all of us, full stop. Yes, even my brother, who thinks the idea of God is bullshit and a plan to keep the masses pliable, has Divine in him from where I stand.
I’m OK if Eric disagrees with me. I’m OK if you disagree with me. These piles and piers are mine. And amazingly, the compulsion I have to tend to my connection to the Divine isn’t about fear of it going away or the idea that I might be excluded if I don’t. It’s about cleaning the gunk created by the lies of old stories around the connection so I can feel it. The tending looks like the daily practice of calling and having a conversation. Letting my intuition and the voice that grabs on to words - like erosion - guide my attention.
photo by Todd DeSantis on Unsplash
Our deep foundations are reaching up for us. We get to decide how we engage with them. By engaging with the deep foundations, we support and stabilize their tops while actively allowing them to support us. We still rest above the stabilized soil if we don’t engage them.
So, the question is, as we work and erode the ground we’re standing on, how do we stay stable? Do you consider connecting to a deep foundation, even if it’s one new to you?
There is no right way to do this. There is only the way that makes sense for each of us. If you’d like company along the way to help you uncover your story and decide how you want to move forward, message me, and we can talk about Reclamation Coaching.
Until then, travel safely. -Kelli
