Benblog

Touching the earth

Talking with Michael a few weeks ago about soil formation has me thinking more and more about soil systems generally, and how we focus so much on the top soil, the very, very tippy, tippy top of an eons old process dependent on so many micro and macro forces that understanding the physics of the process requires a little humming now and again, just trying to tune in the cosmological chords ultimately at work.

But touching the soil again, going out and weeding rows and rows, feeling my glutes shiver thinking about all the bending I've done over the last couple weeks, brings enough of the poetry to connect me to the forces that brought me to this moment.

The ancestors farming.

The ancestors, when all else fails, eating the earth.

That should be a basic question for all society - can you eat the dirt you walk on? If not, why not? Is it dirty? Is it polluted? Does the earth not taste good?

Independence Day

Traveling on July 4th was like Pride. Most of the security, most of the staff, seemed to be normal woman and men who don't have the family obligations of most, having been rejected for non-comformity. Failure to abide by contrived strictures of what thou shalt and shalt not love, as if loving wrong can ever be sinful.

For those with families chosen as those of their own have rejected them, I pray for a day when our country will welcome love itself as a God-given and inalienable right, protected and encouraged by the state.