"Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why do we look up for blessing-instead of around and down? What hope we have lives there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls."....Ursula K. Le Guin

Down into the belly of the earth I seek myself. My blood warm and pulsing, flowing like sap in the veins of a tree that has seen time through the eyes of the season. I breathe and leaves billow out from limbs long and lanky. I breathe and ripples run through the sweet smelling earth. I breathe and the ground vibrates, knowing who I am. 

Deeper, deeper still I dive into soft dirt and pass tiny roots of withered flowers and cut down grain. All a purposeful sacrifice. Ashes to ash and dust to dust, the interminable cycle begun. Will you return my loves? Will you rise once again as light and warmth, sun and heat call you from this desolate slumber? 

I move with ferocity, anxious and unrelenting in my destination. Flesh falls away and bone and sinew become entangled and interwoven in this dance macabre of my desire’s yearning. Small droplets of water pool around me. Small pools in this subterranean world that are barely the dew on ground’s brittle grass. I blink with eyes no longer seeing the light and moistures floats across silent gaze. 

What will you give me? What will I become? My will is strong and so all that surrounds me in my devotion to you dissipates in the wake of my expansion. You who is known as Gaia, the Great Mother, Mother Earth and so many names that are pale in comparison to who you truly are. Life’s blood, sap and water all infused in human and topography entwined in lover's embrace. Dirt and leaf, mountain and rock all molded as the form of humanity’s corporeality. 

Can you feel me reaching into your body? Can you feel my devotion as I have tenderly nurtured and cared for your life as prana ran through me strong; breathing life into my earthly form? Will you open to receive me as devotee, as particle  of your being, as child of your ever changing  existence? 

I feel the heat of your body, your heart’s beat thumping and throbbing filled with darkness that is the womb of all life. I feel the tides moving within as I sink ever more deeply into the cradle of cosmos mirrored in the galaxy of your axis. Stability is found in what moves juxtaposed to expected course. You have taught me that the mysteries are held in what is seen in plain sight, not in the seeking for abstract illusion bound by time's illusory confines. You have filled me with the antithesis of being and cultivated the slightly askew perception that holds me true to creation’s demands. 

I sink even deeper into what many would say is the great space of disappearing, the abyss, the threshold that stands as violent gate of release. But I have never felt more potent, more powerful, more filled with creation’s life! I surrender into the flow of your molten core and light tempered by the darkening waters of fertile womb that envelope it. All of me streams out into paths and oceans, sparks and flame, crystal and ash. It and I are one and in this shaded veil of darkened light we pulse and flicker as one light. One catalytic stream of Divinely emanated flash that pierces the great darkness above and seeks its mate. 

There is nothing and there is everything held in the potential of what lay within your belly. Deep into your belly of quickening. Deep into your belly of transmutation the seed finds its Source and readies itself to be birthed anew. You sigh and in the great exhalation I am propelled upward, a tiny stream of core’s heat, ascending, arising seeking the memory of a form that was once and could be again. 

I am carried on streams of darkness; streams of tiny droplets that feed infinitesimal cells of vibration, light and movement. I am cradled in warmth. I am bathed in rain. I feed from the decay of another whose journey is just begun in seeking what I have known. I will nourish and tend to what grows and awaits birth in the belly of a mother. Our souls and light will touch and the cycle will begin anew with the child’s first cries. 

The earth vibrates, the Great Mother exhales and I arise; a tiny delicate sprout of Gaia’s blessing.