蜜芽传媒

鈥楧o you ever think about moving back?鈥�

That was the question of the taxi driver, taking me from my London train to the funeral of my Auntie Olive in Swansea earlier this week.

I'd told him how my Welsh Dad had first met my English mum while working in London shoe shop. And that not long before her due date he鈥檇 announced he鈥檇 bought plane tickets to Wales.

He said his child - that was me - was going to be born Welsh.

It wasn鈥檛 until their fourth and final child was born, 12 years later, that he felt it was ok for us all to move to England.

But something in the land of his fathers was always drawing him back. The land exerts a special hold on us.

I was reminded of this on reading about an American soldier, stationed in Italy, whose wife was due to give birth.

He shipped out a tupperware container of earth, from his home state of Texas, which he placed under the bed when his wife went in to labour.

He wanted his son born on Texan soil.

Pretty eccentric you might think but then we often carry deep attachments to land and place, to the ground that was first beneath our feet.

Ties that bind us in history and culture and family, how we carry our identity in a world on the move.

We鈥檙e sometimes said to have multiple identities which is another way of saying that we can hold several homes in our hearts鈥� and our hearts can make room for them.

We hold them with both joy and grief - the ground where we grew up or fell in love or raised a family鈥� the ground we left, not always by choice.

But geography does not exhaust biography.

In autumn days, walking through falling leaves or pulling apples off a tree, we鈥檙e unusually aware of the ground beneath our feet鈥� this living earth that we come from and return to.

In mystical religious traditions there is a deeper ground which is sometimes called 鈥榯he ground of our being鈥�.

One very early Christian text describes God as 鈥渢he one in whom we live and move and have our being.鈥�

For some the ground of our being might be the divine, for others it might be our common humanity, that which connects us below all our differences. For some it might be earth itself.

The idea of being global citizens is noble but can feel a little grand or abstract. But citizens of earth, maybe less so.

Earth, always right under our feet.

Grounding us all.

As the Sufi poet Rumi put it, 鈥楾here are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.鈥�

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