Sacred

 

Whose stories live in the soil beneath your feet?

How many stories of your own have happened and been held by this soil?

All the mudpies your children made.

That last time you saw your grandfather.

The Apple tree that fell down last winter, rotting back into the soil. And all the stories it held, tree forts and years of apple sauce. 

The people who stood here before you. The stories from their lived lives entwining within the particles of soil, as in their dying they became soil again.

Whose stories live in this soil?

How many millennia of Aboriginal hands harvested from this soil, burnt country to feed this soil, birthed children in the waterways that feed this soil, or beneath big wise trees that held the soil, the birthing knowledge and all those that birthed and were born. How many songlines were sung as this soil was walked? How many seeds were flung and grew and lived and died on and in this soil.

How many millennia of animals that weren't human lived on this soil, fed this soil with their blood and shit and bodies?

How many species lived their great existence arc here on this soil and dissolved back into it?

How many plants thrived, or struggled with roots holding fast into this soil? How many of the particles of this soil came from those plants, from those human and non-human animals. 

How many microbes, have lived their whole lives in the world of this soil? Their bodies serving, being and becoming soil. Unfathomable numbers of so many tiny ecosystem members making life possible above and below the surface of the soil.

How many stories, carried across galaxies on the back of an asteroid came to this soil? 

Hold the soil in your hands, feel its ancientness. Feel it's newness, made out living and dying microbes, feeding all beings and being fed by them. 

 

New and old. The soil that fed your ancestors, the soil made from your ancestors. The soil that fed peoples for tens of thousands of years. The soil that fed other beings for millions of years.

How can we be anything but awed by something so sacred? Something tying us to our history, something holding our ancestors. Something tying us to our great great grandchildren. How we serve the soil helps their possibility of thriving come into being. 

The soil catches you in infinite timelines, stretching into the past and future, tying you to both. And yet, in that infinite timeline, now is always the most important and influential time. How you act now affects the timeline. And in this, we can see composting and soil building as sacred rituals. Acts of intentional reverence  to the living world that relies on soil health, including you. It honours every soil steward who comes after you, every living thing that feeds here afterwards. And it honours every soil steward before you, every being who fed the soil in their living or dying, plants, microbes, animals, including human animals. 

Who could possibly own soil? How could it ever be anything else but...

Sacred.