With Hands in the Soil

Out in my front yard, my garden is stirring after an erratic but wintery winter.

In the two eight by eight beds that flank my driveway, the green shoots of garlic that overwintered are getting perky again.  The asparagus has started to offer up its first tentative shoots, which means I've got about a month of early spring harvest ahead of me.

The budding seed potatoes that were starting to get out of hand in the darkness of a cupboard have found their way into half-barrels filled with compost and leaves.  Those taters were getting desperate, flailing out long dead-white tendrils that made their section of the cupboard look like something out of a John Carpenter film.

I've been clearing out all nine of my raised beds, pulling old weeds and removing excess leaf-fall.  With the beds prepped, I've brought wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of compost from my slightly disappointing compost yield for this year.  Even though that new earth isn't quite ready, it's still got plenty of wriggly waking worms mixed in, who'll help continue to break down the soil now that it's been mingled with the earth of the beds.

All of it means that I've got my hands in the dirt now, and it's a good feeling.  It is, rather literally, grounding.

I was down on my muddied knees weeding one of my four by four beds on a warm afternoon when a neighbor walked by.  This happens regularly, and it's a way for overly-introverted-me to be stirred to conversation with the souls who live nearby.  I'll hear their own stories of planting and soil, or tell them about something I'm excited to be growing.  It's part of what makes gardening such a pleasurable thing.

This neighbor was, as it happened, one who had recently yelled at me as I walked my dog past his property.  Twice.

Ah, thought I.  It's That Guy.

As he strode up the sidewalk, eyes forward, I suppose I could have ignored him.  Just kept my head down, busily paying attention to anything but the human being who was crossing in front of my property.

But the day was bright and lovely, and spring was in the air, and my hands were in the warm earth.  Gardening has me in the habit of offering gracious words to passers-by, and I was in no mood to be anything other than neighborly.  

"It's a beautiful day to be out in the world," I piped up, trowel in hand.

He looked over, a little startled.  "It really is a great day," he replied.  Not a hint of animosity in his voice, not even a whisper of the snarl that had last soured it.  He offered up a gentle smile of genuine pleasure at a shared and glorious afternoon.

"Enjoy your walk," I said.

"I will," he said, and continued on up the street.

It's good to get your hands in the earth.  It really is.

Earth and Life and Dirt

Mixed in with several loads of laundry, shopping, and doctoral project prep, I spent much of yesterday out in our yard, doing the things one does when you're trying to get a garden in order.  I had no idea it was Earth Day.  I was just doing what I needed to do.

I watered and weeded and inspected our two everbearing strawberry patches, both recovering from a relentless assault of voles last fall.  Pesky little varmints.  There's some replanting that will need to happen, but the few survivors seem to be bouncing back nicely.

I trimmed and shaped and sorted, moving the leafy debris to a few piles in the wooded area behind our house.

I circled the periphery of our front yard, and found that five of our six blueberry bushes are budding up nicely, with the largest already going to flower.  The sixth, well, I think it looked too much like a stick to a neighbor's mowing crew.  Oopsie.

I watered and weeded the patch of peas that I started a week or two back.  As I did so, I realized that the soil probably should have been enriched again before I planted.

That implacable, drably tan Virginia clay just isn't giving up its spare nutrients lightly.  It's cracked and dry and hard, even with the good rains we've been getting, and the young peas aren't happy.  I'd done what I could in the fall after I was done with the beans I'd been growing there, turning in organic matter, but it wasn't enough.  We'll see what the crop looks like.

I'll need to do something to that soil, if things are to thrive.  Though I've started composting and have started a new mulch pile in our back yard, the richness of that newly formed dirt won't really hit its stride until this time next year.  I'll need it before that, particularly if I'm going to try for another round of beans on my little plot come mid-summer.

Shoulda started my composting last year, I thought to myself, ruminating on the silliness of buying trucked-and-plastic-wrapped dirt from Home Depot.

So I was thinking about earth, about the complex organic mess of minerals and the former stuff of life, as I climbed up on the rooftop of our house.

Rains were forecast in the afternoon, and with the trees dumping tree-stuff all over the house in the spring, it makes for clogged gutters.  I clambered about on the shingles, popping the wire covers off of the gutters and scooping matter away from the downspout intakes.  In the gutters, there was dirt.  This was not the clay of the garden.  It was a mix of pollen and seed and leaf fragments, blown dust and rain. There in the gutters of my home, it was moist and warm, rich and dark, perfect soil, so close to life that it was almost alive itself.

Because the best earth was once alive, rich with the complex stuff of life.  It takes time, and life's own self-sacrifice.

And you find it in the darnedest places.

Cassini and Faith

Yesterday, the first of the raw pictures came back from the Cassini spacecraft, on its long trek to the gas giants in the outer reaches of our solar system.  Many were striking, but the one that got me was the one to the right.  There, in the deep blackness of space, a bright point of light, a featureless blue-white sparkle in the heavens.  Below it, a smaller, slightly dimmer speck.

Earth and the moon, those two dots are.  Here we are, seeing ourselves from a distance that renders all of human life and history to its actual place in the universe.  We're teeny tiny, so infinitesimal as to be just a speck in the vastness.

This is not a new observation, of course.  It was made wonderfully by Carl Sagan, years ago, as images of a distant earth first reached us.  That Pale Blue Dot is so precious, yet so ephemeral.  

What struck me in seeing those Cassini images was, unsurprisingly, the faith spin on all of that.  Unless a faith can take the reality of our place in the vastness into itself, it just isn't real.  So much of the way human beings have come to understand our faith casts all of existence in earthbound terms.  We often proclaim a great and cosmic struggle, and yet the scale and scope of that struggle never leave the bounds of the speck we inhabit.

If the most fevered yearnings of John of Patmos came true, and Revelation were fulfilled tomorrow, and the seas ran with blood and there were horsemen and beasts rose from the sea in a way that would give Guillermo del Toro goosebumps...so what?

The view from Cassini would show that same binary planetary system.  Maybe the Earth would have a slightly redder hue.  

But the rest of the universe would trundle along oblivious. To be meaningful in an existence of this scale, faith has to be both larger and more intimate.

Larger, in that we have to understand all of our sacred stories in a radically different way than our forebears.  They need to speak into the reality of our place in a Creation that is more wondrous and humbling that we ever imagined.

More intimate, in that we need to see the defining existential purpose of faith...which gives meaning and purpose on a human scale.  What matters is our capacity to find that which gives life integrity and direction, and there, an open, gracious faith does so.

If we can do these things, our faith still has purchase, even if all we yet are remains on that tiny bright speck.

The slightly bigger one, that is.