Communing with a Sea of Grasses | Erin LaFaive

These grasses have been beckoning me for some time now.  

Something about them is so beautiful and enamouring. 

I kept coming back to stand and watch them from the shore of the sea of their blades. 

Is it their color I’m drawn to?
Their color is magnetic.
How strange it feels to be overjoyed with shades of browns, tans, yellows.
I feel the same excitement as I do looking at a rainbow in the sky.

Is it the sound?
The swish, swash, and shush in the breeze.
I detect a rattle and a rainstick.
It’s soothing and hypnotic.

I resisted mixing with them, “too many wood ticks in there, the ground looks swampy, they’re just dead grasses, what’s so special about that?”

The dried, “dead” blades and spent flowers waggled to me in the breeze.
I know they’ll soon be hidden by the new, green blades emerging in a few weeks. Then, I won’t have to feel the mystery of the magnetic pull.
It’ll be over. Lost in a sea of green.

More standing, more watching, more wondering.

Then one day I wade in.
I stop and wait.
I don’t sink into the mud.
All is well.

I tentatively move in deeper.
The brown sea of blades sway with the wind.
The crows caw from a distance. 

I went back home.
A clump of grass in my hand.
They insisted on traveling back home with me.

Back again.
Standing on the shore of the grass sea.
I don’t hesitate to walk in.
I want to submerge myself in this sea of brown blades. Sit and listen to them.
It’s time to know. To know what it is they want to share.

I sit with my back against a large tree.
I face the sea.
I wait.
The sun plays a light show – emerging and hiding – with fluffy white clouds.
The sun soaks into my skin like liquid light.

I let my mind drop out of analyzing mode.
I see with my heart,
hear with my third eye,
and feel with my eyes.
I listen with my lizard brain.
I begin to commune . . .

“What is it about you that pulls me?”
“We match, look at our hair”
“Yes . . . okay . . . we have the same colors . . . but what else?”
“Listen. I’m telling you the What Else.”

I drop down deeper, silencing my mind, expanding my field.
Then, the transmission comes:

Maybe your hair is my hair.
Maybe the grass we see are the heads of beings,
The body underground,
moving info from root to root,
communing through electrical impulses,
with the help of fungi, bacteria, and the rest of the “network”.

Maybe humans began as plants.

We grew tired of being underground.
“Let’s grow up”
So we did.
Poked our head above the surface.

We grew restless near ground level.
“Let’s grow higher”
So we did.
Pushed a spine straight up to the sky.

We grew bored of staying in one place.
“We need to move”
So we did.
Kicked out our legs, shook out our arms.
We flopped, we fumbled, we stumbled.

But soon we moved about freely.
We lost our ability to tap into the “network”
And make our own medicines,
And make our own food,
And have relatives to talk to.

It’s good we took our relatives with us – seeds, roots, saplings.
Propagating them over and over.
To have them to talk to, tap into the “network”
We never fully left the earth.

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