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.