If you are able, go outside to someplace where you can see the contours of the land. It might be on a hill or where you can see a road cutaway showing hte layers of stone. It might be in the middle of a wide field or plain stretching as far as the eye can see. Even if you are staying in your own home, try to find a good picture that represents your alnd and perhaps a handful of the soil found nearby.
Make yourself as comfortable as you can, inphysical contact with the ground if possible. Slow your breathing and close your eyes. Then imagine that your awareness is sinking into the ground like a taproot, down through your skin and into soil. Explore that soil for a moment, countless tiny particles ina thin layer across the land, shot through the plant roots and fungal hyphae and the tunnels of tiny creatures and so many bacteria and other microscopic beings that hte soil is alive! Consider how in millions of years this very soil that you tcouhc ay someday become shale or sandstone or some other sedimentary rock.
Now explore deeper, below the soil. Remember what you learned about what’s beneath your home; allow yourself time to “dig” down through the layers of geological history, millions of years measured in inches and feet. Think about how the stone first came to be, whether as magma, ash or cinders, a volcano; sediment washed up by watery currents; or older stone pressed into new forms by heat and tectonic forces. Think about what beings may have first walked upon the stone when it was young and open to the sky, and how their memories may still be recorded there in spirit, if not in form.
Remember the water that has sluiced across teh layers of land here time and time again. think of the rain falling down on ancient mud flats and sandy beaches, sizzling on fresh magma, cutting channles shtrough beds of volcanic ash. Imagine how ponds and lakes have formed in depressions, deepened, then filled in again to become meadows and forests that press the old silt beds down into the earth.
And when you are ready, come back to yourself, but bring back a thin core of these layers with you. Embed them into yourself so that whenever you call upon the elements, you know their presence in the history of the land. When you go outside, know that you are poised on the newest page of a book of ancient history, contributing your tiny part to the grandest story the land has ever told.
Adana Luna 