Holiness in the Dirt

The work days were interestingly bookended.  We started the week spreading worm poop – a ton of it; literally 2000 pounds of it – and ended the week spreading chicken poop.  It’s a sentence that I couldn’t have imagined writing not too many years ago, but there it is:  manure in all its glory, large and small, put to the ancient use of fertility.  Reality is more exciting than the facts might sound.

 

It is planting season of course.  The grass is growing, the chickens are laying, the dandelions are blooming, the flower beds are bursting, the rain barrels are filling.   And we have been working.   The garden beds have been prepared – cleared of remnant detritus and lightly tilled; scored with a hoe and drilled with an auger, the seeds have been meted out and the greenhouse seedlings have been transplanted.  The tomato cages have been placed - though their securing still needs reinforcement - and the irrigation drip tapes have been unrolled into place.  

 

Life has been nudged forward in the direction of color and fruit, and thanks to the earthworms and the chickens, it has been encouraged.  Fed.  Nourished. Beckoned.  With the manure.  Small and large; worm and hen, bucket and shovel wielded by Lori and me.  It gets down to basics - far from any glamour, it’s about the humble building blocks.  The occasional rains will surely help, and when it refuses, the faucet.  Sunlight will do its part, as will we with the hoe.  But it’s the soil that will make the difference – the soil, elevated by the excrement.

 

I once heard a famous chef observe that cuisines were born out of the creative use of the poor leftovers, the discards, the refuse.  The result, he said with a smile, was the inversion of desire.  Having discerned its quieter value, that creative use elevated and popularized the previously maligned, overshadowing the once-preferred. 

 

I have no idea who figured out this miracle of manure – above who’s ancient head the bulb of insight flashed on – but it’s funny to recognize that same inversion in the garden.  What comes out of the ground as food is beneficially returned to it in digested, concentrated form.  As important as are the seeds and the seedlings, it’s the shit that is the salvation.  

 

I suspect that truth is resident and operational in all manner of pursuits – for those with the patience to wait for it, the vision to discern it, and adequate humility to wield the shovel and carry the bucket and entertain the possibility that mouths are not the only valuable orifice.  I have work to do in that regard, but in the chicken yard and the garden I have good teachers. 

 

And plenty of opportunities to learn.

 

We shovel, then, and turn in the promise:  a kind of genuflection amidst the sacrament of the soil.