Findng the Earth in my Hands
I looked down in the land of my grief and there it was - something I’d never seen before. It was earth in my hands. I didn’t know where it came from. I looked out across the horizon of my life, my circumstances, my contexts and the con in my texts, and I saw desolation. I saw isolation. There was no vulture to light on a tree and no dead body to rest near. Not yet anyway.
Photo by José Ignacio Pompé on Unsplash
There are no trees, no bodies, just parched earth. The kind of earth that won’t take water any more. It’s what the earth looks and feels likes when malnutrition sets in - it needs careful care - because run off is all the water it senses and touches. The best thing to do is to bring life back to a single patch - in small ways - with human hands. Places like Ecosia do this and it’s the picture in my head for my own life.
I’m still standing - a specter - pale, see-through, ghostly and ghastly - malnourished - barely hungry - barely living. And then a wind blows in - an ancient one. A living melody in the earth - what I call ancestral magic. No, not worship of a human. Not idolization of a human. Not indoctrination of human insistence - medicine. Old medicine.
Desiree’ Stephens over on the Liberation Education Newsletter let go of seed in her hand and it landed at my feet. I looked down and picked it up and read the symbols - the runes of medicine. I could only take some in because I’m not a paid subscriber. That’s part of the desolation - a life in barren wasteland. I read what I can. I glean at the side of the fields during harvest.
You know what she said? Do you know what the medicine print was on that little seed?
You’re not collapsing.
These are not her words per se - I’m not quoting her. She uses medicine language. She said plenty - I’ll quote some of it here. You can find the article here too.
She wrote:
“‘Falling apart’” is often just the truth unmasking itself — your soul reorganizing what survival distorted.”
You mean, I’m not collapsing?
She wrote:
“To descend is to bow to what is true. To release what can no longer come with us. To remember that falling apart is often how we finally fall into ourselves.”
Wait - what?
She blows into the fire and speaks:
“Descent is sacred surrender, not collapse. It’s the moment you stop fighting the current and allow yourself to be carried.”
Resting. I tilt my head to stretch my ear upward to the sky - to listen to new ways. She waits and the sparks fly and the warmth ignites further -
“The descent is not your undoing. It’s your initiation.”
Initiation? WTF?
This is NOT an initiation! It’s godamn collapse. If I wasn’t typing I would cross my arms with a furrowed brow.
Like I said, I sat in the fire circle for a second and I looked down from the horizon and there it was - earth in my hands. Not the parched malnourished earth - but whole earth - dark, deep, moist, composted dirt. It was in my fingernails. I could smell it. You know that real earthy smell when you walk into a forest and it’s dense, damp holding water; a well of life that pushes life upward through itself? It’s this mixture of life, death, rebirth that makes and sustains life mixed with tears, grief, re-membering….
Where did that come from? I looked down to my feet and there it was, a circle - a circle of composting dirt. Caked and mixed in was the dry, parched, malnourished earth mixed with shards and debris of memory, pain, grief. The land of my soul COULD accept water - only a certain kind of water - tears - my tears. And, as I smelled that new earth in my hand - the rebirth of the soil of my soul - I noticed something else. I noticed tears in different colors, in different shapes - like fractals of light and dark and reds and blues - a kaleidoscope of time, of place, of sky, wind, and fire - of Spirit.
Wait.
These were not just my tears. They were our tears - the tears of my ancestors - my people. They were the tears of others who I didn’t know. The tears of birds and insects, flowers, and stone - tears of the wind, the rivers, the lakes and the seas - the trees. They were tears of happiness, longing, grief and pain - missing - ME - missing US.
Not the me I had become. It’s not real. And this is hard to explain. It’s not the me who was crammed into a package and labeled to be mailed out into the world like I was a product purchased on Amazon. You know like a commodity - homogenized and branded like cattle [who shouldn’t be branded either]. Like fake news. This “me”was welcomed but only in the sense of medicine - to see - to uncover - to compost. It wasn’t to be hid, but addressed.
That’s the descent. The descent is when I squat low and grab barren soil and compost, grieve, hum, sing, laugh, and sense the echoes, the presence of others standing at the edges of this circle communing, embracing, and interconnecting.
I never thought the descent was communal when it felt so lonely.
I had come to live in a world of disinformation - a world where my soul was supposed to adhere and affix itself to death and convince myself it was life as it extracted and erased everything about me that was beautiful, gross, healthy, sensible, and completely and magically impractical. It took my labor. It twisted love into violence. It sold me and convinced me it was the way of life so I could sell myself in proper fashion.
This is not a way of life. It’s not my way of life. It’s not what my bones say.
I look up again at the horizon and feel more and more through the numb - the heat of the days and nights that produces the mirage of life and water but is really just arid heat and parched land. I cry because the forest that once stood here is gone as I watch the one’s living beyond my internal world be erased. I watch the inner world become the outer one and I grieve, panic, and bend down and touch the soil. I put that moist, dark earth down…..
I mix.
I squeeze.
I cry the tears of the land, the people, the ancestors, my own.
I compost with my bare hands. My knees are dirty. I’m tired. But there is strength yet.
I say out loud to the air as I read as if Desiree’ could some how hear me in the distance.
Are you saying that my life - literally falling apart - is more like an initiation? More like a flow back into myself? I’m the shaky leaf blown by the Spirit wind into rootedness? Are you sure - is she sure about this here [I’m looking around in the room here asking the air, the walls, the cats, and the dog - and yes - the Spirit].
You mean, calling it a nervous breakdown is colonial psychology?
When I responded to her post I said some of this - and I had a “perhaps” there. A hesitation. Desiree’s language is not my communal language. And I’ve noticed the spaces I’ve been in that talk about liberation use this different language. I find myself seeing it in nature - out in my yard quite literally. It’s like permission to see the earth-text.
They use soil language. Words like “rootedness.” They use an earthy form of sacred. It’s the earth-text [versus context] that I some how deeply understand - deep in my bones. It comes from way back where I can hear my ancestors speak in the wind of the trees - in connection - in relational togetherness - where there is no separation. It makes sense.
I can smell the earth and the fire pit and off in the distance, I can just make out the sound of ceremony, ritual, and entanglement. The sound of food- the lowing of herds. That sound, is the smell of the soil in my hand. It literally smells like earth. If love had a smell, it’s in my hands.
Desiree’ says it’s initiation, it’s a fall into the sacred -a descent into devotion.
I thought it was merely collapse. And I sure as hell wouldn’t call this devotion.
And that’s why I suggest it’s colonial psychology. I know my family and neighbors would look at me, clutch their pearls, gasp, maybe pass out, for sounding so damn woke. HA! I let them be. That’s the mirage, the illusion, the shadow. I know that place - my descents always involve clutching pearls as I learn to stop casting them [before swine - didn’t Jesus say that?].
I’m digging in the soil grieving, listening, being, cultivating an inner soul into rich soil to plant - liberation. It’s a shared crop. And it IS DEVOTION! Oh rootedness, there you speak. I see you now!
That’s their word - the medicine people like Desiree’ - and I’m still trying to understand what it means because when I do this and smell the earth - what I smell is LIFE. It’s the working through of decay - death - with healing water [tears], and release. It’s letting go of the seed and letting the wind take it and deliver it to the thirsty land - a land where the tears are flowing, the knees are dirty, and the hands are moving to a hidden garbled memory of melody to repair the soil.
That’s what I was missing in colonial psychology. Land there is conquest - TAKE THE LAND to liberate it.
No. No. That’s not soil repair. That’s not earth-text. That’s what I’m missing. That’s why it never felt sacred. That’s why it always felt like I skimmed the surface on an oil slick looking like water.
I need soil repair. That’s sacred. That’s devotion. That’s rootedness happening in real time.
I descend and speak:
Titled: Bowed & Silenced. ©2023-to present. A-joy all rights reserved.
Look, I’ve got training in psychology/counseling. I’ve been the therapist in the room with the “interventions.” I’ve been in therapy as part of my training and I’ve been in therapy because I’ve needed it. I KNOW there is something wrong - something that has died and is selling itself as life sustaining in a chair with moving lips masking the clinical setting with couches, lamps, and research. Not all therapy is bad. I won’t say that. But not all therapy is earth and a fire circle with the crackling flame and return to the deep wells of story, to trees under the cover of moon, to the dance and laughter of singing old songs - to the sound of holding cries and tears in a unbathed embrace. A supportive counselor may say do it - but they don’t go home to the community that gets upset with dancing in moonlight and communing with crickets, fireflies and the stray cat that showed at at 11 p.m. one night.
It’s not earth - it’s not earth-context. It’s not medicine. It’s colonial psychology. That isn’t my word - it’s the medicine people’s word. But I know that in my own language - it’s sterile - it’s an “I love you” with a rule to never touch. It’s an “I care” with a rule that says no gifts. Those are ethics - don’t touch, don’t give, don’t let the client breath into newness because it’s unethical.[1]
It’s - as Desiree’ says -
“Descent is not failure — it’s an invitation to shed illusions of control. Supremacy culture teaches us to hustle toward the light, but liberation asks us to honor the dark. In the descent, we find what’s real.”
Psychology never taught me collapse was falling into myself. Okay, maybe Jung. But I never liked Jung outside of play therapy and Sandtray. Chuckle.
Psychology - colonial psychology - taught me that my trauma was individual and an anomaly. It taught me that I couldn’t trust myself because I had been harmed while ignoring the abusers already taught me I couldn’t trust myself. While I get my nervous system is reactive, I also hold the eyes of a person who can smell and read fine print because I’ve had too unlike people who have convinced themselves that the wider community is safer than it appears. It’s not my fault you don’t see it even when I describe it like the flight of a heron over water.
Please explain to me the paradox- that the psychological world promotes the best place for healing mental illness is in community while out of the other side of its lips it talks about mental illness being stigmatized. In other words - how can a community that stigmatizes mental illness - that won’t even look at it on some days until they want to perform “suicide I care please contact me” memes and claims it’s individual failure - be safe to hold people with mental illness? Are you fucking blind? How do you get to tell me I can’t trust myself while you’re flapping a paradox from sour wind and too many cookies?
Okay, that was a mouth full. We go to therapy because we do not have fire circles. We die at our own hands because the community was unwelcoming. This is not genius here - it’s known, felt, experienced, and registered too by harder data in figures and charts. That’s colonial psychology. To me, it’s the repair worker who looks at the cog and says, oh, you’re the problem, I’ll tweak this and grease you up and put you back in the machine so you can perform and die doing so but not until that last drop of life is spent on a bottom line and a full payment on a Lamborghini.
That shit is real. I’ve lived on both sides - patient and clinician.
Deep breath - grabs barren soil - starts to mix - exhales.
Desiree’s ancestral medicine says something else. It says instead, what’s really happening is my embodiment is calling me home to embrace the shadows - to confront - to hold accountable - to renew the whole of me into sacredness with the hope of spilling outward into the forest and communal fire [because she writes about liberation outside of individualism - you know - community].
This is different. How do I know?
I looked down and saw my hands full of earthen soil. I looked down around my feet and I found a circle. And now, I noticed something else - I see the hands, the wings, the leaves, the branches, the melody of twilight music of those around me digging the circle with their tears, with their hopes, and with their life - calling me home - and I’m re-membering.
Notes:
[1] Ethics in counseling and some social work all deter clients from bringing in thank you gifts - you know offerings. They forbid touch - so no hugging or holding - because of the fear and potential of sexual abuse or manipulation. The problem is touch is needed, hugs are healing, and offerings are an out pouring of a grateful heart. It’s clinical, sterile, and fearful. Abuse happens in these settings with these ethics which live on paper, but have only context - con in the text. I wonder what would happen if the nature and knowledge of medicine with the smell of soil would do to such settings - because therapy doesn’t work for lots and lots of people.
Bibliography
Stephens, D. B. (2025, October 5). Descent as Devotion: Reclaiming Endings as Sacred:Liberation Lessons: Actionable Advice for Radical Change A Weekly Paid Subscriber Bonus. Liberation Education Newsletter. October 5, 2025, https://desireebstephens.substack.com/p/descent-as-devotion-reclaiming-endings?publication_id=2004337&post_id=175343471&isFreemail=true&r=3m9tbo&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email