Get Dirty

Some people go whole years without touching dirt, without running their fingers through the moss or walking barefoot on the grass. Some people go whole lives without stopping to love the earthworms and the beetles and the lowly things that busily make life happen all around us. This is the root of sadness. We are made to love. We are made to love things that hold us. We are made to hold things we love. Touch is essential. Babies wither and die who are not touched. Adults who do not love things become hard and cruel.

Touch the earth. It will hold your grief and your worry and your pain. Don’t be afraid, the earth has always held you, has always opened willingly, given you all that you need. Touch her rich soils, her barrenness, touch the earth, bury your hands in the dirt until you touch the worms, bury your face in the grass until you inhale life. Smear mud on your skin, put your nose in the dark richness, close your eyes, this is the smell of life. Even the decay, the rotting, molding masses, even the fungi that tear living things into death, make way for seedlings.

Some conifers produce seeds that must be cracked open by fire. It does not take intellect to know that life needs death. When you are lost, hungry, yearning to hold something dear, to be held in the embrace of all that came before. When you are hard and calloused by the harsh weather of your life. When you have curled, perhaps slowly without realizing, into a tight mass that is barely breathing. Touch the earth. Let it crack you open like the cone of a Douglas fir, let it break you into tiny shards so that the seeds of hope can spill forth from what is left of the past. You must dig beneath the surface to lay those seeds; touch potential, ever-present.