Groundedness requires actual physical ground, not digital information.

Evidence

Strange as it sounds, this explained my need to go to the Rose Garden after the election. What was missing from that surreal and terrifying torrent of information and virtuality was any regard, any place, for the human animal, situated as she is in time and in a physical environment with other human and nonhuman entities. It turns out that groundedness requires actual ground. “Direct sensuous reality,” writes Abram, “in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 103

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Deep Listening and One Square Inch of Silence material on listening to place as a grounding practice.
• DEFINE: Establishes why ‘groundedness’ is literal here, grounding Odell’s core metaphor in physical place.