Hitting Rock Bottom

Society, it seems has hit rock bottom. Where do we go from the bottom?
When reaching rock bottom, like a Cornish miner, we keep digging for tin or ore, but really we are digging for gold. For the gold of a nation or a small community. We keep digging deeper - after all the rock is never the bottom. That is what we find ourselves doing now, like humble miners we keep digging deeper within the depths of what it means to be human. Coronavirus has dragged us down and inward into a place of introspection and retrospection. This is the place of fear, of uncertainty but also - like the jagged serpentine sea bed that adorns the shores of my home we find something richer, a grounded-ness, a deep red and green of essential being. It is here that we find ourselves cracking and breaking and splintering out into the beautiful pure quartz of the soul - a place untouched by ego and desire. The only desire being one which guides us to know more, to learn more. This is the place where peace can happen if we allow it. 

In a world of rules, laws and restrictions there are no more barriers when we reach the purest sense of being. Yet it is a terrifying place to be. Who are we without our usual idiosyncrasies, our culture, without the whirr and hum of distracting chaotic strife? There is no ship to climb aboard. We are tossed carelessly around with each turn of the tide and change of the times. We are floating. And yet that inner smuggler who knows how to make do, will salvage what she can from the wreck, will take the pearls of wisdom that sit smooth and promising. He who finds himself stranded, will hold the sea glass up to the light and use it to make a fire. In a life of limitations, perhaps we are realising that we don't need anything other than the safety of knowing that we will survive.

On this journey, I have found myself at times deeply lonely and afraid, feeling as though a dark, trapped energy encumbers my spirit. The world seems to be a tragic poem leaping out like a phantom, or crying like the lost children of the woods. It feels like a poisonous venom seeps out from the darkest shadows of human kind. A vivid, barking spirit of the soul which harks back to our animalistic origins.  Then there is the warmth of light, the powerful, burnt-orange glow of a sunset that settles and realigns. The turquois blue of a sky that sits on the forehead and mildly promises calm and change. The heart punches towards strong moments of love and emotion, it wants to be moved, whereas the brain pines for a deep blue stillness. 

What I have found most intriguing during this journey within is how immensely delicate we all are without our cultural barriers, our formed identities, our relationships and accepted norms to guide us. Society is a thin veil cleverly constructed for safety and security but broken souls sing for freedom from fear. Broken souls cry in psychiatric wards or in childhood bedrooms, some are soothed, loved and warmed, ultimately fixed with more empathy and wisdom. Some only see the dark, living within the black stratospheric edge of the cloud, not lost to the air and still clinging to the edge of a sunset. 

At this moment, my mind and soul exist in a state of crisis where being myself is a scary yet liberating thought. When I laugh, I feel too loud, when I cry I feel like I could cry for the world. We live in a time where singing or dancing too loudly brings about sheer joy and excruciating fear. Where spittle of care-free laughter is feared covid-venom. Yet, as I walk these quiet Cornish paths which shaped my childhood, I realise that the land is having a moment of reflection, the pitter-patter of gentle footsteps are finally acknowledging that the land is a uniquely selfish phenomena. She goes on, breathing, existing, adapting, regardless.

I think of her, our Mother, finally taking a huge sigh of relief. She is relieved that we have paused injecting these chemicals into her body, that we have stopped flying machine birds over her climes, that our drilling and killing and clawing at her, has been slightly reduced. That the addictive, non-hesitating chitter-chatter of life has slightly hushed. We want to heal, as she wants to heal. We want to live holistically away from these cellophane wrapped lifestyles. But, I also think of broken souls who pick at their broken heads and clamber over one another in city jungles, their futures hanging over them in a grey, polluted, city slum haze. I think of refugees floating in the channel. And Uighur Muslims being brainwashed in concentration camps in China. i think of that sickly, acidic stew of mans wrongs. And I hope, that when the sun rises over delicate, poor heads in the morning, it gives them a taste of what they are truly worth, the Earth.

Mine-shafts collapse to remind us of the sensitivity of our planet. The Earth is a heaving, breathing beauty, which quivers under our drills, which dances to our giggles, and yet until we lay our ear to the ground and listen we cannot hear that deep sigh of relief. Slow down, she says. Slow down. So, as we break into pieces, as we cry into the deep dark blackness of being, as we splinter into pure quartz, thank the Earth that we have hit rock bottom. Allow her to be, allow yourself to be. I think we live in a time where we need to gently let go and love. Loneliness brings us onto an island yet, the earth is as lonely as we are, swerving around the stars and we are all on this lonely little planet together. Ultimately, embrace being broken, for know that in order to be fixed we must break down, breaking open, fractured, dismantled like the broken paradigms of society. And then rise up, rise up stronger. Re-connect to the fragility of a world that needs you to sustain her as you have needed it.