Soul beneath the soil – A Celebration of Earth Day

My daughter runs a small farm in Vermont.  In early spring, even while the snow is still on the ground, her rickety old front porch turns into a plant nursery as big wooden planks are attached to the walls so flats of vegetable starts can find their place in the sun.  Tenderly she presses seeds into the soil of each small container.  With time and patience, each cup cradles a longing for bountiful harvest.  Each seed, a gift of life that will, within the dance of sun and soil, take root and offer its fruit to nourish her world.  If you pay attention, it is a moment filled with the essence of life. 

There is however, a lot of pressure to get things going.  A good quick start will stock the roadside farm stand, fill CSA boxes for delivery, and create the bounty needed to survive as last year’s canned goods run thin.  There is a mountain of pressure to hurry.  And yet, before she places the vegetable starts, she pauses and takes a deep breath of time to write some words of longing, words of hope, words of trust, onto each wooden plank that will hold each start.  Words that are a thanksgiving for the relationship that is about to unfold. Poetic words that will linger beneath each small plant start soon to rest on a wooden plank.  

Those words…  They are the soul beneath the soil. These are simple words that entrust one life to another.  I believe this is a way to construct meaning for our time.   It is the speaking of language that binds us to the very gift of life wherever we find it.  

When I was growing up, I would stand in some big church and speak words that were crafted to construct a metaphysical world that seemed so distant from the one in which I lived.  Words to connect me to some heavenly homeland. Today, my daughter scratches language beneath the very soil that nourishes her family.  This is the soul beneath the soil.

My guess is, that Jesus was probably doing something similar until organized religion got in the way.  He spoke a poetic language written beneath the lives of the famer, the beggar, the widow, the fisherfolk, the wedding.   And yet, to this day, church people continue to use a strange and distant theological code language that provides some assurance that we have mastered a world beyond our own.  Was Jesus really describing a metaphysical world, or helping us understand the one in which we live? With the growing realization of our deep and abiding interconnectedness to the natural world, religion might do well to construct a poetry of the soul that can help us find ourselves within the wonder, the pain, the grace and the mystery of the life that we live; To find our soul beneath the soil.

When the seedlings grow strong enough to enter the furrowed rows of rich soil on my daughter’s farm, those heavy planks get thrown behind the garage until next year.  Over the next long cold winter, the words will slowly dissolve beneath the falling snow.  Come spring, a new poem will find its way onto a wooden plank.  The circle of life will fulfill its promise and my daughter will pause to mark her family’s place within the dance.  It is the language of the soul that each of us writes beneath the gift of life.