The Ground is Alive and Cannot Be Tamed.

Here is an audio version of this blog post:

My brief but months-long quest to capture the ground started in the fall of 2023. I was walking the trail in my parent’s neighborhood. It is not a very scenic trail, in my opinion - mostly houses and fences on one side and a false bayou on the other. Part of the trail is covered in a black rubber-type material, the rest is sidewalk. My forest loving self is often disappointed by it, as I am by most suburban landscaping.

But I am often challenging myself to see abundant life and wildness in places where there first appears to be none. One day, walking this trail, I noticed the rubber black covering splitting. My guess is the hot Texas sun and the life in the ground itself caused the split. There were deep cracks and gashes, some of which the trail’s caretakers had attempted to patch up only for it to split again. From those cracks were emerging all types of small low-to-the-ground flowers and “weeds”. In some cracks you could see all types of insects carrying resources and building homes.

The ground cannot be tamed, I thought with excitement. There was some way in which that acknowledgment spoke freedom for me. The suburban ground - this thing that looks so coiffed and unmoved was breaking free over and over again. I too, in being myself could naturally break and break from society’s landscaping and containment.

From that day forward, it became my joy to look down as I walked and notice the life in the cracks, the life from the cracks, and the life of the earth indicative of the cracks themselves. I am reminded, here, of Bayo Akomalafe’s We Will Dance With Mountains. I am also reminded of a significant experience I had when I was at a retreat center for a ministry I worked for.

I was walking and felt the Spirit tell me to stop and turn to the side and look at this bush (or small tree?). This bush-tree was not burning like the one Moses encountered. There was nothing spectacular about it at all. But the longer I looked, the more I saw layers of life within it. I wrote about it later in my journal:

“There were flies and beetles of every kind. Blue flies and Yellow flies and Brown Beetles and Black Beetles and Green Beetles. Then a Grasshopper hidden on a stem. A bee moving from flower to flower. A bat in the tree, a chipmunk running about. A black and white butterfly.”

This small experience was revelatory in ways that I will probably write about in other posts. But one thing it sparked is a practice of turning and looking, of truly regarding the life and the wildness of life that is easy to miss. If it is difficult to notice the layers of life in a small tree, it is often even more difficult to notice the life in the ground itself, much less to capture it. Maybe that is one of its strengths. It is difficult to contain or anticipate its movements.

Back to my parent’s neighborhood trail: I started taking pictures of the ground beneath the rubbery neighborhood trail, and the sidewalks, trying to capture this life. This proved to be really frustrating. I’m not a photographer. And I found I couldn’t capture the ground breaking the side walks with the potency that I could feel in real life. I could not capture well the red ants in the cracks milling about, nor the abundance of the tiny flowers that flowed from the thinnest of splits in the black rubber.

I tried to represent the fullness and liveliness of the ground by turning the photos into digital collage, but every page seemed too small and too square. I thought to create a collage where different elements would burst out from a central point, instead of trying to fill the screen, to better represent the abundance. But I found extracting the tiny elements I was working with felt too labor-intensive and ended that before even getting anything on the page. I bemoaned not being a better visual artist and not being able to work with images with the ease and quickness I used to when I was younger and constantly making things.

Finally, I gave up and assumed I wouldn’t be sharing this work. Because it failed to capture what I wanted. Because it was incomplete. But I’m trying to honor the process over the product. And the process did what it needed to do.

The ground is alive and cannot be tamed, it spoke again and again with every failure to capture it. Just like it cannot be contained under that rubber black trail, it cannot be captured by my lens or my representation. Somehow that gives me joy and relief and gratitude - for the ground, for the life in it, and for the parts of us that are underground and shifting or breaking through.

I share a couple of my attempts in the next post (Crevasses: Untitled & Incomplete). An invitation into practice is below.

Turning & Looking Practice

This practice can also be done not with the eyes, but with the ears, by listening. It is simple and can be done indoors or outdoors… almost anywhere really.

Stop and look at a small part of your environment (or listen to your surroundings).

What life or signs of life do you notice? Name at least three things.

Look (or listen) longer. Name at least three more things.

Look (or listen) longer. Name at least three more things.

Take all of this in deeply. Pay attention to how you feel or what these signs of life evoke in you (feelings, sensations, understandings).