Grounding the Current
A piece for my writing class with author Paul Kingsnorth at St. Basil's College of Writing
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For all the ache in the small of my back; for the interrupted rhythm of my heart; for the stalled circulation and stilted uptake in sugar in my blood; for the dizzy spells that take me for a spin behind the eyes and make me think of my father dying at my age, or the time I let a demon in the door, or that I fainted before pushing my son into the world—for all of this I have been prescribed a remedy: to take off my shoes, place them on the ground outside, and recalibrate the frequency of my body to the frequency of the earth.
The music of the planet has a low, inaudible tone, a steady pulse at the frequency of 7.83 hZ, called the Schumann Resonance. It is not named for the musician but for the physicist. It is available to stream or download online but is better encountered through the body than through headphones. Speculation is that resonating the body with this tone can cure everything from depression to cancer. I don’t know if that’s true, but when I place my bare feet on the ground and grow still, I undeniably feel the buzzing.
The medicine is to get down as low as I can from the lofty atmosphere where the brain hovers, sixty-four inches above the ground. The medicine is to remove the protective layers and rejoin the spinning planet, to move with it at one thousand miles an hour (which, to us, is standing still), and entreat my soul to stop its own wild dervish-whirling and return to me.
My feet are chilled in the October afternoon, and beneath the damp wood chips, wood lice scurry, feeding on the molds and rot and contributing to the bulk of the soil. Their waving feet alone would generate movement: earth-movers shifting, pushing, redefining the land. Beside me, youngling plants push their roots deep into the manure-enriched soil, striking down to find purchase in water or minerals, cascading over small rocks to reach the mycelium that is making family with older plants—nasturtiums courting elephant ears, salvia romancing liatris, zinnia brushing coyly against the thready roots of rose.
Early on, when we first planted this garden, a bear walked out of the forest, between the garden fence and the wood pile. The fence comforted me—somewhat. His footfall, silent but heavy, joined the current and I remembered coming onto this sick and sterile land with a prayer for the wild things to return, and they did.
The cool on my feet and the back of my neck grows as the sun shifts behind the trees; a dog’s bark waves through the air and meets the skin behind my ear; a sparrow’s sharp chirp needles my forehead; the downy woodpecker taps a tree and the vibration grows. Sounds are only touch felt in the ears, but even more in the body.
The percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who is deaf, feels music in her body; feels not only rhythm, but tone, too, felt-frequency—in her body, and thus, her spirit. Plenty of gardeners are blind, and know their plantings by the texture of the leaves, the silk of rose petals, the feathery fronds of yarrow. I like the soil on my skin, drying into crystalline specks of crushed granite. Pricks of rose-thorn are nothing to me; wouldn’t we all bleed for the sake of beauty?
If I am to tune myself to the planet, let me get a packet of poppy seeds and stick one finger in the dirt, and let the seeds shimmy along the earth’s sound wave to the place they’re to land. Maybe the chili peppers do not wave in the wind, but bounce as the current dances along the network of fungi. Maybe I am not so out of tune after all, but am being called back to the magnetic pull of the Maker.