Untilling the Soil/Soul
To celebrate this day, I thought it would be fun to share two of our greatest passions on this special day...creating soil and soil-bathing.
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
"If we have declared a war against the soil itself, the we have literally declared a species level suicide."
~Earth Activist, Vandana Shiva
The same goes for declaring a war against the microbes in our guts and on our bodies with antibiotics and sanitizers.
I'll be the first to admit...I'm a dirt bag. And I'm proud of it!!! No hand sanitizers or antibiotics for me!!! Here's why...
Did you know that there are around 1 million living critters in just a tablespoon of living soil? And there are more living beings in the soil than there are walking on the soil?
And BTW, dirt is not the same thing as soil. When the conditions are right, no pesticides or tilling, there is a living food web beneath your feet.
We love to create soil by composting our food scraps in bins, trenches and worm towers. We also create soil by spreading wood chips throughout the year and allowing the fungi, bacteria, and worm dudes to turn it into rick dark soil.
Another cool thing about composting is that seeds just sprout so easily. This is an image of a seed sprouting from a store-bought avocado. I pull these out every few days and pot them.
I personally feel an obligation to this practice. To give back to our Mother. In the process it is a way to innoculate our bodies with beneficial bacteria and grow the most nutrient dense food available. This is how we grow our inner and outer gardens to their fullest genetic potential. This practice is what I refer to as "soil-bathing." And we get to do it everyday :)
Recent research has shown that a beneficial bacteria in the soil called m. vaccae actually improves mood and immune system function.
For more info on the health benefits of soil check out this article: https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/993258/dirt-has-a-microbiome-and-it-may-double-as-an-antidepressant/amp/
And that's just a fragment of what we know of the benefits of soil bathing and soil creation.
On a spiritual level I feel that the soil is our soul. It is where we find our ancestors and a form of soul retrieval to connect with this living substance in gratitude and remembrance.
In this article I discuss this concept in depth: https://steemit.com/fasting/@thegiftofself/how-the-soil-became-our-soul-fasting-spirituality-and-the-ancestors
Hope you enjoy the symphony of soil on this day and many more to come!!!
How's your garden growing?
You can read this entire article on Steemit right here 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
https://steemit.com/earth/@thegiftofself/happy-earth-day-reciprocate-mother-earth-by-turning-lifeless-dirt-into-a-living-soil-food-web
Aloha beloved Earthlings!
❤️ Pachee
