We have the holiday Mother’s Day coming up and it is a pretty commercial day, but it also reminds me of one “mother” who doesn’t usually get celebrated. Mother Earth, who must deal with our trash, mining, oil spills, polluted air, cutting of trees and many other actions which must cost her much grief. Now we even have a controversy about greenhouse emissions. We often feel as if we have lost touch with ourselves and with reality. We seem to be being pulled in many directions with our busy schedules. The ancients believed when this happened, you should take off your shoes and stand upon the ground in your bare feet. Then you do a standing meditation in which you pray and remember that the same Divine Energy that is above you in the air and below you in the earth, also flows within your body. The phrase “Take off your shoes, your are standing on sacred ground ” conveys the search for the sacred in the ordinary.

On Holy Ground

——Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

And only she who sees, takes off her shoes;

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

 

 

“There is religion in everything around us,

A calm and holy religion

In the unbreathing things in Nature.

It is meek and blessed influence,

Stealing in as it were unaware upon the heart;

It comes quickly, and without excitement;

It has no terror, no gloom,

It does not rouse up the passions;

It is untrammelled by creeds…

It is written on the arched sky;

It looks out from every star,

It is on the sailing cloud and in the invisible wind,

It is among the hills and valleys of the earth

Where the shrubless mountain-top pierces the thin atmosphere

of eternal winter,

Or where the mighty forest fluctuates before the strong wind,

With its dark waves of green foliage;

It is spread out like a legible language upon the broad face of

an unsleeping ocean;

It is the poetry of Nature;

It is that which uplifts the spirit within us…

And which opens to our imagination a world of spiritual beauty

and holiness.”                —–John Ruskin

This Mother’s Day I am not only going to celebrate the holiday with daughters and with other moms and nanas or grandmothers, I am going to do something good for the original mother. And I will be standing in my bare feet on the ground as I smell the flowers in my garden and as I stand in silence and know I am in the presence of God.