 Jehanne Mehta is a singer-songwriter and poet whose works are deeply in tune with the spirit of our Earth, and with our infinite human potential. Stirring our hearts and reminding us of why we are here, her magical words are beacons.
Dear Friends,
The whole earth is within you
The whole earth is within,
From your incandescent centre
To the boundaries of skin.
A crystal sphere of radiant light
Is truly what you are.
As the sun grows brighter in your heart,
The earth becomes a star.
What an extraordinary hope, that we might have the capacity to change the Earth from the inside! We have glimpses sometimes of the larger picture, when, perhaps through struggling with illness or slowly recovering from loss, we become aware of the subtle alchemy the pain has wrought because, suddenly, we feel lighter and more open to other people and to the world. The shift is small, maybe, but the world comes to meet us in a new way, because we’ve changed inside.
Think how the clarity of winter sun lifts us and draws us out into the street, or out into nature, into the crystalline purity of a frosty morning, when even the birdsong seems to ring in our heart. Turn that around and imagine how, as we awaken into our own centre we start to shine too. It touches the world and the world responds to that light; those around us open up and come out of themselves to meet us. It’s yet another step to feel and understand how we can actually affect the Earth herself by the changes within us.
The native peoples of America have a profound understanding of how to touch the Earth with their feet. If you think of it just on the level of sound, the connection between the words ‘sole’ and ‘soul’ is obvious. But perhaps it goes further. The native peoples know that our souls touch the soul of Mother Earth through our feet; and the soles of our feet, as we know from Reflexology and Metamorphic Technique, are holograms of our entire being. I was fired by the special walk I learned once for a circle dance, inspired by the Native American people, where the foot was at first placed lightly and gently in reverence and respect for the Earth, before, with a forward shift, the whole weight was given, as if to say ‘I greet you with respect, and now here I am’. When we walk, then, if only we are aware of it, we are in deep communion with Mother Earth.
Walking is such a fascinating and deeply meaningful activity. One day, while on my way up from town to our house, on a hill with views over the Cotswolds, the imagination came of the light beings within the Earth rising to meet my feet with every step, in a kind of light-mirror dance of above and below, an imagination which gives such a spring to your step and real joy in the contact with the Earth. In a speech class several years ago we were given a technique to help prepare to speak a poem, where we had to impress the poem into the ground with our feet as we spoke, so that the Earth could hear it. It was a heart stopping experience, and the poem became much more alive afterwards. A metamorphosis of the mirror dance imagination came into a poem I wrote for a friend who was very ill.
Nothing is lost.
The Earth guards the imprints of
your feet, and
the light elves dance them,
stitching each one to the soil
with threads of delicate music.
(From the poem The Narrows)
If we begin to sense our conversation with the life force within the Earth as we walk, we overcome the literalism of our society, which takes everything at face value, getting stuck at the surface, on the skin of things, imprisoning us in the isolation with which we are so familiar in our culture.
Don’t let your heart stop at the surface:
There are faces behind faces,
Every one a virgin forest,
Home of countless hidden species……
(Lyric from the song Faces)
And the more we go inside towards the central sun of our being, experiencing the world and feeling our sense of self, radiating from our hearts, the more levels of being and meaning we discover and the more at one we feel with all life and with the heart of the Earth.
Looking happens from the heart
and you can feel the touch of trees
in the listening brightness reaching out
where once your skin was fortress.
(From the poem Taking Leave of the Senses)
Sometimes there’s a feeling, that we are on the verge of a fundamentally new experience of being human, and that it is an incredible blessing; we have such potential as human beings on this beautiful Earth at this time. Perhaps it’s about the ‘shift of the assemblage point’ that Don Juan describes in Carlos Castaneda’s books. I’ve always liked that concept. What is happening now feels like a move to a completely new place in our spiritual heart, as if to a hidden part of it we haven’t really explored yet. In this point of radiance, where we feel ourselves as the centre of a sphere of light and we actually know that this place is both totally self, in the highest sense of the word, and yet is totally at one with the centre of the Earth, we awaken not only to our responsibility to the world and humanity, but to our very real power to inwardly shape the destiny of the Earth, through the light within us.
The whole earth is within us,
The whole earth is within,
From our incandescent centre
To the boundaries of skin.
A crystal sphere of radiant light
Is truly what we are.
As the sun grow brighter in our hearts
The earth becomes a star.
With much love, Jehanne Mehta
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