One of the things that has long appealed to me about Unitarian Universalism is its openness to earth-centered spirituality. “Earth-centered religions” are listed as one of the living traditions in our Unitarian Universalist principles and purposes statement, and several years ago, in a major survey of UUs, it turned out that the most common theology amongst our younger members is one they describe as earth-centered.
I, for one, am all in favor of our getting in touch with earth-centered spirituality. Locating the holy in all the beings of the world matches both my intuitive sense of living in an enspirited world and my social preference for radical egalitarianism. Even more than that, however, I suspect that our salvation on a living, but threatened, planet lies in the willingness of human beings to treat the other creatures of the earth as holy beings with inherent worth and dignity of their own rather than resources to be consumed. However, it wasn’t until a friend insisted that I read a book with the rather uninspiring title Dirt, that I really gave any thought to earth centered spirituality: spirituality based in the earth itself: the very soil, the dirt.
Dirt, after all, is the lowliest of the low, the realm of mere inert rocks mixed with whatever is dropped, left over, excreted or dead. The word “dirt” itself refers, etymologically, to the excretory part of the equation, not unlike another four-letter Anglo-Saxon term which I try not to use in church. Spirituality, traditionally, is associated with the “higher” capacities of human beings, more akin to stars and soaring birds than worms and fungi breaking things down into their component parts. But the more I contemplate dirt, the more a sky–based theology seems sterile, insubstantial. The Greeks, who formed so great a part of our Western philosophy, tried to separate the spirit from the body, to tell us that real reality was in a realm apart from what we could actually touch, that the spirit was only contaminated by the flesh. In doing so they split us off from our roots, from the literal ground of our being.
The Hebrew Scriptures, however, tell a different story—a story we all know. After creating light and dark, water and air, stars, planets and all the swimming, flying and creeping things of the world, God reaches down and grabs a clump of dirt, and out of this God makes the first human beings. In the original Hebrew the connection is made even more clear, for God forms the person, Adam, from adamah, the earth. In English the closest equivalent might be to say that humans were created from the humus. We aren’t just from the earth. We are the earth. “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.”
Perhaps that is why we have tried so hard to cut our connection with the earth. People do often seem to have a difficult time with the notion of being compost. Generally speaking, we don’t care for the concept that we live only a brief time, and then go back to dirt. And why not? It doesn’t seem fair that all our work, our creativity, our running and playing and talking and singing should come down in the end to passive dirt.
Except, of course, that there is no such thing as passive dirt. Dirt grows as humus forms from organic matter. It moves, sometimes subtly and sometimes with pyrotechnic grandeur: sand dunes crawl with the wind at the rate of inches per day. Dust blows off the Sahara and comes to rest thousands of miles away in the Amazonian rain forest. Volcanoes erupt, spewing mountainsides out into great clouds of dust that may not settle for years. Speaking as someone who has lived most of my life in California, I can say with all certainty that it is impossible to feel the ground roll under your feet during an earthquake and still retain an image of the earth as passive and inert. Dirt changes, not only on a grand geologic scale, but also through a constant exchange of minerals, as plants grow and die and water leaches out minerals and carries in new ones.
In his book Dirt, William Bryant Logan points out, “Science says that an acre of soil produces one horsepower every day. But you could pour gasoline all over the ground forever and never see it sprout maple trees.” Dirt is with us, not just as something we are constantly trying to remove from our clothes and our homes, not just as the surface upon which we walk—in however removed a fashion. It is not even simply the medium in which our food is grown. We live by virtue of a vast network of exchanges which puts the stock market to shame. Carbon dioxide, oxygen, nitrogen, elements too numerous to mention buzz and vibrate amongst us like a vast hive of bees, and it is dirt, with its elemental partners air and water, that fuels the whole vibrant shebang. We marvel at the feat of walking on hot coals, but the reality is that we all spend our days treading on slow fire. William Bryant Logan puts it this way:
Moses, it is written, “turns aside to see a wonder,” a bush that burns but is not consumed. Throughout my life, I had thought this a ridiculous passage. Why should God get Moses’ attention by such outlandish means? I mean, why couldn’t He just have boomed, ‘Hey Moses!’... Now I know why. The truth, when really perceived and not simply described, is always a wonder. Moses does not see a Technicolor fantasy. He sees the bush as it really is. He sees the bush as all bushes actually are. There is in biology a formula called ‘the equation of burning.’ It is one of the fundamental pair of equations by which all organic life subsists.…All that is living burns. This is the fundamental fact of nature.
God tells Moses to take off his shoes—to stand in the dirt. We might do the same. Or at the very least, engage in an activity so dirty that your shoes fill with soil and could just as well not be there. It is, so my friends who are real gardeners tell me, the only way to understand dirt. There are hundreds of names for different types of soils, but that provides only a beginning. Logan points out “For more than a century, chemists have been trying to answer the question, What is humus? And to this date, no one knows. Probably no one will ever know.” Humus, like humanity, seems to break down into component parts which are similar, but never identical. We are, quite literally, fed and sustained by diversity. Humus, like humans, makes the most sense described as interconnections—relationships rather than pure essences. I suppose you come to know a soil like you come to know a person, over time, through conversation, in a willingness to work together and allow the connections to deepen.
I must confess that I am, as a gardener, something of a dilettante. Nonetheless, over the years and in various locations, I have made more than a passing acquaintance with the dirt which I, rather misguidedly, think of as “mine.” I first really met up with soil, with the particular character of dirt, when I bought a house in the agricultural area of Moscow, Idaho. The dirt of our front flower bed, unfortunately, was dense clay, which I imagine once occupied the spot where the basement took up residence. This soil, I gather, was not helped by the presence for some decades of a vast monstrosity of a juniper bush. A four-wheel drive truck with a chain took care of the juniper bush. Making the soil permeable to something more tender than a pick-ax took longer. Dirt-centered spirituality teaches the virtues of patience, of sustained contact, of knowing when to pull hard and when to let go.
My friend Theresa and her pick-up truck brought over a load of manure, and she and her partner Rebecca and I shoveled the…dung...one late fall as the first snow started. As we spread manure over the top of the plot and mulched it with leaves, Theresa assured me that the worms would do their work, and by spring the soil would be mixed. Dirt-centered spirituality teaches the joy of cooperation, and appreciation for friends, even for ones as unprepossessing as the earthworm.
My front flower bed always had areas where only the irrepressible violets would grow, but the balance shifted, and after four years it really did look more like a garden plot than a moonscape.
Each year I added some more organic matter to the soil, and each year a few more perennials survived. And each year, in the spring, I would head over to my neighbor Bill’s to beg a few more of the transplants from his stunning garden. Small town that it was, Theresa gave Bill the benefit of her composting expertise, and bits of Theresa’s garden began to look familiar as I recognized the same plants that Bill has shared with me. Dirt-centered spirituality, like all authentic spirituality, is about connections, all the untold and often indescribable ways that our lives are interwoven, the magic of transformation that takes place as the elements meet and recombine.
As I’ve moved around the country, to Chicago, then to a couple of different towns in California, the process has repeated. In Chicago a different neighbor helped us dig out a different—but equally ugly—juniper, and our neighbor Diane’s transplanted irises moved into the front flower bed, once we painstakingly dug manure into the dense soil. In San Leandro it was feverfew and columbine from my mother’s garden that managed to take root after we dug out the lava rock and dug in the manure. Now some rosemary plants that used to be in my mother’s yard are growing by my driveway, and our neighbor Ann says that the iris-y looking bushes all over the front came from one plant in her back yard.
Again and again I’ve rediscovered that dirt-centered spirituality is rooted in relationship—not only relationships between beings, but also the relationship between beings and place. It is about the ordinary, essential joys of knowing who you are, which is only possible when you understand the web of connections which holds you up.
For all its variety and complexity, dirt is, perhaps, the quintessential basic thing. Whatever its form: sand or dust, humus or clay, whatever the balance of minerals which turn it black or red or yellow or brown, dirt is fundamental. All of us, no matter how hidden the dirt around us may be by asphalt and concrete, rest in the end on that thin layer which holds us from the molten rock beneath. In remembering the earth we re-member ourselves, bring back all the pieces scattered through cyber-space and tele-time and recall that we are indeed rooted in soil, that we live in all the messy and transformative glory of plain dirt.
