The Uncelebrated Ground

Reaching stillness in a world that won’t stop

There are so many people doing so many vital and totally uncelebrated things in the world. Building boats. Tending gardens. Mending broken bodies. Honouring the dead, feeding what’s hungry, listening when no one else will take the time.

Our collective life depends upon multiple elements that never make a spectacle. Quiet work that goes unseen, continuing without any need for praise. The ground doesn’t seek applause for giving us food, nor do the lungs require thanks for their rhythmic labour. In the philosophy of the 5 Elements, the Earth belongs to this same order of quiet power — a deep intelligence that holds, digests, and renews, unconditionally.

In the rush of progress we forget the sacredness of stillness, measuring our days by what gets done, instead of how we might contribute. Realising our unique part of the puzzle requires a deep unlearning, and some level of rebellion — shaking off the world we have been told to join and instead creating new pathways that do no harm. The clothes we buy, the food we eat, all tainted by the relentless march of consumerism, injuring others we cannot see, authored by systems we can only challenge when we stand together, beyond the narrow goal of our own happiness and healing.

Therapeutic containers offer, at their root, an essential pause. A counter-cultural exhalation, and the invitation to go backwards, directly into a relationship with loss, not gain. As described by Josh Cohen, “In one way or another, a patient comes to psychoanalysis to be relieved of the pressure to produce, to formulate a solution, to get somewhere. It offers the experience, as Winnicott hints, of discovering the layer of pure being buried under the surface of daily doing”.

The Earth offers us this quality at all times. Neither feminine nor masculine, beyond the ‘content’ of our world, above the paradigm of judgement.
Our planet moves according to gravity, cycle, flow, and mystery.
There is no hurrying of the seed in the darkness or questioning of the descent into winter: in Earth’s timing, decay creates life.

When we slow down enough to feel the vibration of the Earth calling our attention downwards, we might begin to remember what we’re made of. The weight of our bones, the steadiness of our breath, the hum of mortality beneath the concrete shape of thought. Stillness is not absence; it’s the medium through which our aliveness can be met.

Lately, I’ve been more aware than usual of how much of contemporary life asks us not just to do things, but to display them. That shared compulsion between us to prove that we are here — visible, relevant, good. Even presence has become something to perform, demonstrate, and brand into product, course, retreat.

Earth Poet recently explored this in her essay The Performative Nostalgia of Social Media, drawing on Susan Sontag’s warning that photography would eventually become “a substitute for presence.” What was once a powerful interruption — taking a photo — has become an entire mode of being. We live moments divided: half inside them, half already imagining how they will look when shared.

I recognise this in myself. Can you own it too? The reflex to frame, caption, define. But definition can never be the same as presence.

Instagram, for all its uses, is a marketplace of affect. What looks like intimacy (yearning, gratitude, vulnerability) travels well, but risk doesn’t. The familiar composition, the recognisable aesthetic, the intellectual conclusion — these are the currencies that gain traction. What is being steadily eroded is contact with the raw material of life — the dirt of the shadow, the ordinariness of us all, and the uncelebrated ground from which creativity, sanity, and community actually grow.

We’re living in societies that keep teaching us to hope for alchemy, that elusive place where we’ll make gold, destroying our climate in the process and bypassing the simple kinetic power of what is. If we really paid attention to how things actually are, what kind of new choices might we make? Kinetics is a helpful word because it reminds us that life is movement, that change is inherent to our being. What I’m trying to say is this: we never needed to search for change in the first place. It is already in motion.

“The word human comes from humus — the rich, dark earth. Maybe to be fully human is to become good soil.” — John O’Donohue

I’ve been pulling back.
Writing quietly. Experimenting more.
Letting the words come before the framing.
There’s something profoundly healing about working without audience — a bit like the unseen work of the deep dark earth: turning, digesting, releasing and creating from what has been discarded.

The gold, first and foremost, is in the stopping. Remember when Covid hit and all the planes were grounded, and the birds sang louder, and for a moment we experienced the possibility of a different way? People were dying, but in the bigger picture, and just for a moment, the planet was given respite from our continuous activity. When we stop, the flow of life returns. In a human body that flow is made tangible through the movement of emotion, and when our feelings flow we engage the kinetics of healing. Cry and the sadness releases, ask for help and the burden eases, experience belonging and the heart expands.

“To stop is to begin again. Stopping is not defeat, but a form of intelligent love.”
— Charlotte Joko Beck

In the spirit of everything I’m saying here, and in the interests of going backwards, right into the work of pausing, I’d like to share one of the guided meditations I give to my Earth Matrix participants, specifically the Earth Element meditation. It is an embodied return to the field of the big mother — a conversation between your body and the Earth. It invites you to remember that you are simultaneously form and emptiness (a body and the flow of life moving through the space that you are) and to encounter the stillness that makes renewal possible.

You can listen wherever you are: seated, lying down, walking slowly through your day.
Let it be what it is: a brief undoing.

🎧 Listen to the Earth Element Meditation ⇩

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Earth Matrix is a slow open group with space for up to 8 members. It runs throughout the year and offers the full synthesis of my practice: Elemental Chi Kung, Dreamweaving, Group Therapy and BodyMind Maturation. You can find out more and apply here