The Body Against the Earth

The body in a prism of light

Did you know 
there will be poppies 
again this year?
It's true. I've seen 
their muted green fractals 
stockpiling sunlight,
distilling it down
to its purest essence
before igniting
into slow motion fireworks.

In the end, isn't this all
that's required of you?

To drink in what you love,
to concentrate it
in the crucible of your body,
and, finally, to bloom. 

— “ALL THAT’S REQUIRED OF YOU” by James A. Pearson

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A June circle of dog rose bends and blushes around my body

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Morning breaks. From the private shores of nocturnal sailing to the crack of an egg against the pan; the day’s first light is the dream’s last breath. A quiet breakfast, a hasty departure, and an aftertaste of longing and sustenance in the mouth. I open the door, leaving one fire to step out into another, green and burning with the affection of sunlight and the turning cycles of flowers.

A June circle of dog rose bends and blushes around my body. Vermillion-red oriental poppies bleed through the borders in a procession of breaking hearts. Spires of wild verbascum, blue-eyed borage, fine wands of tobacco plant, pale drifting cosmos, and my grandmother’s perennial daisy are still to come. Beauty both present and promised is a slow process of miracle. It is first held within seed-dreams, stitched into the private recesses of a mind whirring in the shadows of sleep. From these dreams we pull the loose threads of images, and witness their slow realisation through a string of magnificently unrestrained forces.

Consider the determined press of the sun and the absolution of the falling rain. The humus makes of decay a fertile and generous altar; how beautiful that life is held in the yoke of death. Yes, green fire—I am in a garden. I am in a church. I come to my knees, lay down in exultation. The body against the Earth. The body in a prism of light.

I love gardens as I love all places of worship—the scent of what is holy, the murmurations of silence, the feeling of being contained within beauty. I pass small, consecrated stones through my hands as though they were a string of prayer beads. The choir is of birds and of wind. Supplications and devotions are whatever you wish them to be: the quiet labour of hands; an armful of damp, pink-petalled peonies salvaged from the rain; a warm kiss planted on a lover’s neck beneath the cover of the trees.

I do not doubt that our lives are long, that they are heavy with complexities, and that they are equally as light with the grace of love. Great, huge, impossible love, and all of the foibles of being. Somehow the garden contains it all within a quiet atmosphere of grace. Somehow, over and over again, our dreams find fertile and impassioned ground in which to seed, flower, die, and renew.

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