Going To Earth

All around me leaves fall gently to the ground or are carried away on the breeze.

Otherwise, the forest is silent and still on this autumn day.

Just like death itself. Or so we might imagine.

Standing in a clearing I watch eagerly for something to move. Something to happen. Nothing does, but I feel strangely noticed.

Welcomed back and welcomed home by unseen eyes.

Long since fallen and half sunken under the earth, a nearby tree trunk beckons me with the half-remembered scent of damp decaying wood. I settle on its mossy flank and feel the flesh beneath the bark accept my heaviness. Its woody scent mingles with the rising petrichor of damp soil warmed by the afternoon’s ambient light. In the fullness of this strangely backlit presence, I am embraced by the immense stillness of the place. Its colours hold me. I breathe them in and the forest fills me. Utterly, Utterlessly.

What light there is, seems not of sun or moon or stars, but appears to emanate from elsewhere; a lightness of an abiding presence; a light that obscures as much as it reveals about these trees’ dynamic lives:

trunk and branch

crown and root

fruit and seed

leaf and mycorrhiza

sapling and skeleton

flourishing and decaying.

Life and death, simultaneous in giving and receiving. 

Distance, space and time, colour, shade, and shape. All a blurring of absence and presence seen from

above

below

within

without

beyond.

Yet all held in a hand’s palm.

Coming to, I feel full.

Replete with the silence. Satisfied, yet eager for what might follow.

On the point of something.

The forest, embracing me tighter, looks expectant.

I await as if for a birth…

Sitting, my tree trunk seat gives a little.

And a spider scurries away out of reach. All legs in motion. Presaging.

I feel I’m slowly sinking. Down.

being drawn into

welcomed by

merging with

becoming part of

taking root

returning earthwards to the soil.

A layering down has begun

A movement down to join those lives who’ve already passed along this downward way.

Is this what dying feels like?

A becoming one with

At one with

At one meant

Atonement: the healing recovery of the memory of where we all emerged from. 

A home coming?

We may rail against mortality, but, in truth, death is but a return. Life a temporary gift of the soil, the source of all life, held gently for a while in our cupped hands to try to slow its passage back to earth. A returning to the soil to merge and rise again as who knows what. An ensoiled transformation of our certain mortality into the adventures of other lifetimes. For we mortals carry life and death within us, as sure as we carry our body’s weight of soil. We are ensoiled earthlings, humans full of humus, full of the life and death that commingles and connects us with the earth. Ceaselessly regenerative. Wonderfully restorative. What’s not to like? Perhaps going to earth is a better phrase than dying?

In the clearing the wind is getting up. I rise and bow to the forest. 

And look forward to my final return.

Terry Biddington, December 2021