Saturday, May 11, 2019

"Loyal To Soil"


 Emma Donahoe sent me a link to this reading, 'The Ground of Hospitality'.  She is now working in Washington on a farm where the motto is "Loyal to Soil".  This is a must read, as it considers so many beautiful dimensions of our relationship with life and death through the soil of the earth.  Sobering.  Liberating.

Reminds me of the hidden regenerative power of the cycle that is built into things and points to the life that lives on after death occurs physically, including some of the more recent examples posted here -- Jean Vanier, Rachel Held Evans, among a few.


From the reading referenced above -- "Enriching The Earth":

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past season
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

-- Wendell Berry