Domei happens in the dirt. It’s not something you read about.
You do not read about dirt to understand dirt. You have to touch it, smell it, taste it, to truly understand what dirt is.
The real contact, the real experience, is not a concept about soil or an idea about earth. It’s the stuff in the actual ground, under your actual hands as you move across it on all fours on a specific morning that may smell of rain or something green and decomposing. The distinction matters; really matters.
The culture of control has swapped contact with the living world for learned knowledge, intellectual knowledge, academic knowledge, head knowledge, and book knowledge.
The learned knowledge is important. I’m not negating it. I’m saying it’s lopsided, two-dimensional.
We know more Latin plant names than we’ve tasted bitter leaves, and we read more about forest ecosystems than we’ve spent hours sitting in one.
The information is real. Yet the contact, the relationship, the kinship are missing – and your body knows the difference.
Stand near a living tree and your nervous system responds. Not because you thought about the tree, or said some pretty affirmation to yourself, but because something far deeper than thought sees another living thing. Your body never forgot what your mind has been trained to bypass.
Domei starts there. Not with intellectual understanding, but with sensation, with felt sense. The roughness of bark under your palm. The give of soil beneath your feet, soft in one place and hard in another.
The scent of crushed leaves is something you can read about, but you’ll never truly know it until you bruise the leaf with your fingers. Then, when you bring it to your nose and breathe deeply, it hits you.
A multi-sensorial experience no book could ever conjure, regardless of how good the author is at spinning words.
Felt-knowing roots your thinking. It doesn’t replace thought. Without it, you feel like a floating head, disconnected from your body.
Spiritual abstraction never gets its hands dirty. It will talk about oneness with nature, about deep ecology, about belonging to the earth, and it does all of that from a comfortable distance. Too frightened to step into life, always staying on the edge.
Fearful because the practice requires effort and the practice requires sacrifice. If you practice, you cannot be doing something else.
And so the living world remains far away over there – pretty scenery, perhaps, but scenery nonetheless.
Domei asks something very simple.
Kneel down. Put your hands into the soil. Stay there until you feel something shift.
Then, and only then, do we begin.