What is The Ground?

Reflections on the source of life and motivation for all creations.

I got so many beautiful messages from my last post introducing a core Regenerative Framework and stepping more fully and explicitly into this work. Thank you so much to those who reached out and responded, I’m eager to share more, and today I’m diving into a Framework that was challenging for me to grasp at first: the Tetrad. We’ll move through this the way I try to move through everything. Slowly, curiously, with feeling.I will try to not be abstract.

It’s easy to be abstract with these regenerative frameworks.

Why?

Because they describe patterns that are present across all phenomena, all life forms, all living systems.

This makes abstraction necessary, but it also makes examples, well, infinite.

So. What is The Ground?

Within the Tetrad, one of many core frameworks within the field of Regenerative Development and Design, the Ground is the starting point, placed on the left side of the framework. Let me show you:

The Ground is whatever is at the foundation of a new system that is coming to life, the “nurturing context that enables things to develop.“

The Ground is soil.

The Ground is beloved land.

The Ground is a community that has been established for some time.

The Ground is a collective longing for a world that is deeply, profoundly, evolutionarily, healed and healing.

The Ground is my childhood home.

The Ground is my marriage.

The Ground is the space in my mind in which I’ve kept safe deep visions of futures I long to co-create with others.

Tonight I am feeling so grateful for the Ground in my life. I truly feel rich with it.

I am also so aware of how groundless so many people and so many projects are. Or perhaps not groundless, but perhaps more ground-unaware. So many of us have been deprived of nourishing Ground due to a culture of rootlessness, an absence of place-based awareness, a disorientation from the center of gravity of our very lives, this Earth, our home. Too many people experience Groundlessness due to displacement, or the absence of a safe and nourishing family or home. This disconnection from a sense of belonging is endemic, but it doesn’t have to be.

I know incredible people who have found Ground in unusual places, in bioregions that have called to them, in families made by choice. The beautiful thing about Ground is that it can be found anywhere if you get low, get present, get curious, get connected.

The Ground is always there to catch you. In my essay Love is Metaphysical Gravity I explore this concept from a different angle. I invite you to read it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. (I really should crosspost it over here to Substack.)

Understanding the Ground of anything we’re working on is the first step toward clarity on its regenerative potential.

It’s easy to identify the Ground of a place based project, not quite so easy to see it when it’s something that mainly lives online, but I’m going to try:

I think the Ground of my husband’s work is his own deep understanding of the role of sexual energy in our bodies, our relationships, and our intergenerational potential for both healing and harm, rooted in decades of both personal and professional experience. That awareness and understanding is the root of everything he is creating and working on. (And shameless plug for the fact that he’s got the goal of interviewing 100 people this summer on this topic, and offering a free coaching session in exchange. If you’re interested in participating head here.)

The question of how best to layer on these Regenerative Systems frameworks into the realm of digitally based microbusinesses is of huge interest to me right now. I’ll be back exploring the tetrad further, and in the meantime I’d love to know-

What is your Ground?

What is the Ground of the things you are bringing into the world?