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Posts Tagged ‘soil’

Driving Back to the Orchard Where Once We Lived

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 1, 2025| 10 Comments »


 
 
I realize I am no longer a slender sapling.
No longer a pink cherry blossom in spring.
But I am not done with my blossoming.
I am not yet done with serving
sweetness to the world.
I am so grateful for all those years
that taught me the importance
of tending to soil,
how to meet drought, how to prune,
how to thin, how to plan.
But I am no longer a sapling.
Nor am I a workhorse of a pear tree
grafted decades ago.
I aspire to be more like purple mustard,
a weed growing exuberant and thick
in the long orchard rows—
grown to suppress all other weeds,
intent on improving the dirt,
a pest control, good for tilling,
a natural biofumigant.
But most of all, there is no stopping
that deep, sweet, surprising
and beautiful scent.

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Ode to Digging Potatoes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on September 27, 2024| 11 Comments »

Go play in the dirt, she said,
and tonight, though I call it
harvesting potatoes,
what I’m really doing
is “playing in the dirt,”
the quickest way I know
to recalibrate the soul.
The potatoes are a bonus, really,
though I say they are why I am here.
Each firm, red-skinned round
I pull from the earth is a small proof
of how things can grow in the dark—
the way a woman, too,
can grow in conditions
when she forgets for a time
there is light.
I sift the cool soil through my fingers
as I pull my hands through the bed,
and I fall in love with this substance
made richer by what is dead,
this basis of all that lives,
this home for the kind of treasure
I honor now more than ever,
the kind that needs darkness and time.

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Porosity

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 19, 2021| 10 Comments »




And so I learn I am porous—
learn I am not just dust,
but soil. Everything
moves through me.
I am not the container
I believed myself to be,
but a portion of earth
more other than self.

In a dream, I was told,
The body is permeable
to life and to death.

I want to remember
that voice. I want to remember
how it feels to be earth,
to know the self as both living
and dead.

I want to remember how absence
has never felt more holy,
how its sacredness is rivaled
only by the holiness of what’s here.

No separation, said the voice.
Remember.

I want to remember
the infinite dark inside
each infinite moment,
how both soil and time
are planted with stars.

Oh sweet teachings
that I cannot understand,
how they spiral out
like galaxies inside me,
how they slip
like loose soil through my hands.

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On Earth Day

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 21, 2021| 4 Comments »



Of course, the trees with their greening,
their growing, their gift of eating light—
how beautiful they are in these first days of spring:
their feathery drupes that gather low sun,
the tender gold when the leaves first unfurl.

But today I am awed by the vital soil that feeds them—
awed by the multipedes and woodlice, fly larvae and springtails
that fragment the once-living world into mulch;  
awed by the nematodes, the mites, the pauropods,
awed by the rotifers, the algae, the bacteria,

the single-celled protozoans—all of these makers of earth.
There’s elegance in the process—the breaking down,
the separation of proteins, the release of nitrogen,
the creation of rich, dark humus.
How seldom I honor the beauty of tearing apart,

the blessing of brokenness, the importance of those
who undo, who help the world go to pieces.
The earth itself is an altar to breakdown, decay,
collapse, demise. And from these infinite violences,
we rise, like trees, we rise.


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There

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 21, 2020| 2 Comments »

Digging

deeper

into the soil

of self

planting

only

seeds

of you.

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