Rooting my feet in the Earth first, then I can reach out toward the air and sky

During yoga class today, Holland, the instructor, made a point of focusing us on our body's connection with the Earth as we sat with our legs crossed and our spines extending up to the ceiling. She stressed that without a good foundation, your practice will be unsteady, no matter how far and hard you reach up and out. She reminded us again when we hopped to the front of our mats after spring-loading our knees in a down-dog. "Be nice to the Earth, and try to land softly," she said. Later, after sivasana, we rolled to our sides, curled into a fetal position, and connected our foreheads to our mats. I felt this flood of gratitude spill out of me toward the Earth as I curled up against it and pressed my brow down into it. Thank you for supporting me, I told the Earth.

I remembered this as a I walked home, and with each contact between clunky winter boot and cement sidewalk, I felt more gratitude for the support of the Earth below me. With my strong foundation in the ground, I felt comfortable and happy looking up and around me at the busy street, the dirty snowbanks, the newly twilit sky deep after 7 p.m. I felt unhurried and unworried by the thrum of life around me. This connection to something nonhuman gave me a brand new sense of relief in a period of time in which I was struggling to find it from within myself and from the other humans around me. 

I decided: sometimes it isn't other people, or ourselves, who can heal us. Sometimes health needs to come straight up through the Earth and into our toes. And then we need to accept it and allow it to grow through us.