Touch Grass

a sentiment that's more than a snarky comment

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The world changes, society changes, we change. I’m old enough to remember when Have a Nice Day, along with a round yellow smiley face (the great, great, great grandfather of all emojis), was a part of the collective consciousness. It was one of those phrases that seemed to capture an entire generation. Along with Have a Nice Day, the mid-1960s to early 1970s gave us groovy, far out, and hang loose. It was a time of optimism, liberation, and experimentation. Pretty trippy, right?

Nearly a half-century later, what do we have?

Touch grass.

This is an expression that diagnoses our collective problem and its cure, all in one handy phrase.

Touch grass, as I understand it, is a bit of snark hurled at those who are chronically online, another buzzword of our day.

Where Does "Touch Grass" Come From?

It's unclear where exactly the slang term "touch grass" comes from. It first started popping up online, at least on Twitter, in 2015, where it was used to call people out for being online too much to the point where they've lost touch with reality.

It's usually used in online arguments against people with passionate opinions that suggest they spend way too much time online, including gamers…and people who seem generally out-of-touch with the real world.

It's like saying "go outside" or telling someone to get a reality check but with a little more "oomph." ~ Know Your Meme

Whether you are chronically online or not, touch grass is great advice, and this phrase alone gives me hope that we are regaining our collective wisdom and remembering how important our connection to nature is.

Eastern Cottontails touching grass (well, actually eating grass) in my yard. Jan Blencowe ©2023

It’s spring, and it’s definitely time to touch grass. In fact, I’ve been doing much more than that. While Hedge Mystic isn't a gardening newsletter, I am an avid gardener, so bear with me while I become a garden geek for a moment and share some of my enthusiasm for growing things and touching grass.

This year, my big project centers around redefining and completing the longest section of the wildlife shrubbery garden, including installing a stepping-stone walkway. This garden has been a huge experiment since the beginning. It’s gone through many iterations and changed significantly over time. It’s also grown larger, encompassing more square footage, and the trees, shrubs, and perennials I’ve planted along the way have also grown larger. This year, many of the “placeholders,” things that came up naturally, like a golden rod, broom sedge, creeping raspberry, and cinquefoil, are being edited out in favor of plants that are more beneficial and better suited to the shrubbery and its purpose.

The shrubbery is composed almost entirely of native trees, shrubs, and perennials designed to support pollinators, including native specialist bees, birds, and wildlife, and is situated on the outside of a fenced yard. Along the fence, I’m working on creating a wildlife corridor filled with shrubs and low-growing fruiting ground covers. Over the years, I’ve noticed that rabbits, chipmunks, turtles, and snakes use the fence line to cross the property and get from one wooded area to the other. Thick ground cover will provide safety, camouflage, and food for these residents.

Yesterday, beneath the Summersweet shrubs, I planted wintergreen, bunchberry, and huckleberry. This week, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to purchase several low-growing chokecherries to complete that section. It gets shady a little further along the fence under the dogwood, and I’m planting some culver’s root and our native Tiger Lily among the beebalm behind the buttonbush and hoping the tiarella spreads more this year. The hard work of weeding, leveling the ground, and placing the stepping stones continues.

My second-tier project is planting a “flawn,” which is a flowering lawn or bee lawn comprised of creeping thyme, self-heal, and white clover. I’m not great with lawns, but I’m hoping to get at least a section established

The third-tier project is continuing to establish the mini-meadow. This is a hot mess of a project right now, and I don’t expect great results for a few more years.

This wild and weedy area (2017) is now part of the Wildlife Corridor Shrubbery. The invading lawn grass, the invasive Chinese Bushclover, the English Plantain and Mugwort are gone. The Brown-eyed Susan is also gone but it has seeded itself in other places around the property. Some of the goldenrod remains because it is such a vital component to feeding late season pollinators and specialist native bees. This end section now has Shrubby St. John’s Wort, Sweetspire, hydrangea arborescence, anise hyssop, beebalm, Joe Pye weed, cutleaf coneflower, echinacea, and switch grass. For scale, in the video you see an eight-foot section of the fence, and the fence has eight, eight-foot sections.

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” ~ Margaret Atwood

Let’s get back to this idea of touching grass.

We’ve had a beautiful spring with the necessary amount of rain, moderately cool but ever-rising temperatures, and plenty of sunshine. I’ve been working outside since mid-March, and here’s what I’ve noticed.

I spend significantly less time online. I can barely get myself to check emails at this point because the change to offline and outdoors is so nurturing to my soul. I consume far less news and feel one thousand percent better for it. Even when I do read or watch something I don’t look at the comments. What other people are saying and doing is not interesting because I have so much of my own interesting gardening stuff going on in my brain. I eat less; I have more energy as if the rising energy of the earth is infusing my cells, and I have greater mental clarity as the cobwebs of the online world, virtual reality, AI, contrived narratives, and echo chambers are swept away by the cleansing sylphs of the air.

This is why I need to create wildlife corridors in my yard. Two days ago a snapping turtle newly awakened from hibernation was making her way down to the pond. Although she is large and equipt to protect herself young bunnies, chipmunks, baby snakes, fledgling birds and others are not so well off. They all need cover to safely move across the yard and into the woods.

The Somatic Connection to Touching Grass

In the alternative healing professions, you hear a lot of talk about getting grounded, being in your body, and having somatic experiences.

Somatics uses the mind-body connection to help you survey your internal self and listen to signals from your body on pain, discomfort, or imbalance. Somatic therapy incorporates this approach to mental health treatment. If you have some familiarity with alternative wellness practices, you may have heard the term “somatics” without having a clear idea of what it means.

Somatic practices allow you to access more information about the ways you hold on to your experiences in your body. Somatic experts believe this knowledge, combined with natural movement and touch, can help you work toward healing and wellness. ~ HealthLine.com

Touch grass, or a tree, hold a stone, smell the fragrance of a flower, let leaves brush across your cheek, sit on the ground, walk barefoot on the earth or dangle your feet in a running stream and I guarantee the somatic experience you’ll have is one of release, unburdening and relief. If you haven’t done such a thing in a very long time you may feel a powerful upwelling of emotion that might even bring you to tears. The deepest earth magic is situated in the earth’s ability to absorb our emotional upheavals and traumas to heal us. Even a short session sitting on the ground can reveal where in your body you hold tension, grief, anxiety and also where you hold joy and your highest most spiritual Self.

Grounding

Earthing, also known as grounding, allows people to directly connect their bodies with the Earth and use its natural electric charges to stabilize them. This practice involves walking barefoot outdoors.

Although earthing can positively impact the mind, this form of grounding differs from the practice used in mental health treatment. Earthing research suggests reduced pain, stress, and inflammation and an improvement of overall mental well-being.

Chevalier G, Patel S, Weiss L, Chopra D, Mills PJ. The effects of grounding (Earthing) on bodyworkers’ pain and overall quality of life: a randomized controlled trial. Explore (NY). 2019;15(3):181-190.

This technique restores the connection between the body and the electrical currents of the earth. 

Earthing techniques focus on reconnecting your energy with the earth through direct or indirect contact. These methods include:

Walking outside barefoot

Laying on the ground

Going swimming or taking a bath

Gardening

~ VeryWellMind.com

If you really want to maximize your touch grass moment do it with the intention to ground and use an appropriate crystal to enhance your experience.

Crystals are after all just really pretty, specialized rock forms. Crystals store information, channel and sometimes amplify or intensify energy.

How to Ground with Crystals

Get outside and sit on the ground, perhaps lean against a tree or boulder or sit in a chair with your bare feet on the ground.

Hold your crystal in your left hand, the hand symbolic of receiving.

Be clear on your intention. What do you want to discover, understand, release, experience or receive? What do you need, or what would you like to offer back to the earth? This is a time for becoming intimately connected to the land, and what grows and lives on it. It is a reciprocal relationship and a healing one.

What crystals to use depends on what you want to do.

Clear quartz is a powerful amplifier of energy, it has excellent memory capabilities, this is why we use them in computer chips. Many pieces of quartz have a pointed end and a non-pointed end. The point concentrates and directs energy. If you need to release painful memories point the quartz away from you. Ask the earth, the trees, the ocean or whatever element, or geographic feature is nearby to draw the painful memories out of you, absorb them and transform them. If you need to access your memories, memories that have been buried within or you would like to receive information remembered by the earth point the quartz towards yourself. I’ve found this extremely helpful when working with my land. I’ve asked the land what was here before me, before my house was built, before deforestation and farming a few centuries ago, before settlers arrived. That has given me a better idea of what to plant to restore the land and the ecosystems I live in.

Grounding Techniques

When we are ungrounded we often mean that we are no longer firmly centered in our physical body. We are basically unaware of our body but we are acutely aware of our thoughts and feelings. We generally think of this in its negative aspect. Our thoughts are running rampant, we are anxious, catastrophizing, panicking, ruminating obsessively on worst case scenarios, reliving moment of grief, loss or betrayal, focusing on insecurities. We might also be held captive by escapist thoughts, excessive daydreaming, and making unrealistic plans. On the flip side being ungrounded can be a mystical experience, one of ectasy, visions, and profound insights. Regardless of the quality of the ungroundedness, whether it be anxious and upsetting, fantasy-escapism or religious ecstasy it is unhealthy to remain so for long periods of time and grounding is necessary to bring you back to yourself, to your body and the here and now.

For this there is absolutely nothing better than to be outdoors touching grass and the earth while working with one of the black crystals. Black tourmaline, onyx, hematite, or black agate are especially good for this. Black crystals are also good for protection but that is for another article.

If you physically feel untethered from your body and the earth there’s nothing better than hematite. Hematite is a dense iron oxide and very heavy in the hand. Sit or stand on the ground preferably with bare feet, cup you left hand and hold the hematite in it. Gently pump your arm up and down and feel the weight of the hematite and gravity pulling you back down to earth. I can personally attest to how grounding this technique is. I have a golf ball size piece of hematite that I purchased at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History some years ago and it has been a powerful tool for me.

Greening and Touching Grass

Finally, we should talk about green crystals. Many of these are oriented towards heart healing and nature connection. Most have a very gentle energy and effect. Use these when your ungrounded state feels heart centered or when you want to connect with nature and the earth in a loving and recipricol way for general health and well being as well as when you desire to bless the earth and thank the Creator.

There are many green crystals. Here are a few I’ve found especially helpful for grounding the heart and connecting with the earth.

Serpentine

Serpentine is a green crystal that promotes a strong connection to the earth and can be used to draw energy from the earth and connect with nature. It has a lovely feeling in the hand and comes in a variety of greens, sometimes with lighter or darker mottling or swirls. It takes its name from the serpent or snake a natural symbol of earthiness, transformation and earth wisdom.

Be as wise as the serpent and as gentle as doves

Moss Agate

Connect to the trees with moss agate. It comes in shades of green, cream and gray with dendrites which are inclusions in the crystal that look like little trees. This is an especially good crystal for becoming rooted into the energy of the earth. Like all agates the energy is low key, stable, grounding and harmonizing.

Be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season

Take either of these green srystals outdoors to soak up vitalizing and calming energy from the earth

It feels like we’ve wound our way over a lot of territory, so lets come back to the current catch phrase we seem to bump into everywhere these days, touch grass.

The collective wisdom here tells us that too much time spent in the online world is not healthy. In the beginning the internet held so much promise. It would facilitate the exchange of ideas, give the common person a voice and an audience it could speak to, it promised to increase the flow of information and get people from different places and backgrounds communicating and forming relationships.

Then the powers that be (who do not have your best interests in mind) found ways to manipulate through algorithms, shadow banning, spying, harvesting data, false narratives and propaganda. They discovered that negative emotions like fear, anger and hate cause stronger reactions which generate more comments, clicks and responses, so they feed us more of that.

Being online now, unless you are extremely aware and careful is an experience that hurts, confuses, and deceives you. Instinctively we know that a return to nature and a connection to the earth is the antidote that will heal the wounds inflicted by (and here I’m going to use a word that Michael Martin who authors The Druid Stares Back uses) the Archons. These are “the rulers, the authorities, and powers of this dark world” and “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

Read The Druid Stares Back article Against the Archons.

The earth, and all that is in it and on it, plants, trees, animals, birds, waters, stones and crystals is created and given to us for our home, health, healing and happiness.

Touch grass, plant trees, grow flowers, care for the earth and find joy and purpose in the real world rather than the virtual world.

I know that many, many of you cherish nature and touch grass often. Share your stories and experiences with grounding, healing in nature, getting off line, finding purpose in stewarding the land. Let’s encourage and build one another up in our choice to touch grass and heal.

The comments section is a safe and welcoming space to share your insights and experiences.

Comments and conversation are always appreciated and enjoyed, so feel free to let your voice be heard. I read all of them and endeavor to respond to each one.

Thank you for reading Hedge Mystic and participating in this vibrant and growing community of creative, spiritual humans. You are always welcome here, appreciated, and loved.