We are all temporarily not soil!
Do you ever wonder why soil smells so good? Why it feels so great to have your hands in the dirt? Do you ever marvel at the multitudes of transformations that occur right beneath our feet?
Sometime in July, whilst sat in a neglected, overgrown and therefore gloriously biodiverse corner of an otherwise manicured public garden, some words swam across my conscious thought. Sensing that small spark of inspiration I promptly wrote them in my sketchbook.
there is divinity in the dirt
I tend to pay attention to these moments. I’m not a wordsmith. Pictures, shapes and colours usually manifest more easily for me than words do. Despite this, a few more spilled out.
the soil sings hymns of life
life giving
life receiving
life repurposed
Some weeks later, I sat on the beach after a sea dip, my body still tingly and zingy with those cold swim endorphins. I opened my sketchbook again and feverishly scribbled the primitive markings of an idea eager to escape the imaginary realm into tangible existence. Moments like this, when I feel less human and more conduit, are rare and precious. I treasure them. My body and creative soul as part of a greater ecology.
Research of a subject matter is a large part of the process. I love the excitement of going down the rabbit hole into the writings and teachings of ecologists and thinkers, and to experience my subject matter first hand ‘in the field’, following the threads and connecting it all together. I’d like to share with you some of the key sources of information and inspiration:
Composting
I have a Subpod worm composter dug into my small personal patch of dirt of a shared garden. I’m always in awe of the alchemy that occurs when I give the worms my unwanted scraps and they transform it into black gold. It, (they) are one of my most treasured *things! There’s so much life and activity in there - they, along with the centipedes, ground beetles and multitudes of microorganisms are doing the work of the world. Apparently there are more living things in a teaspoon of healthy soil than there are humans on the earth! Sounds outrageous doesn’t it!
*how to describe a system full of thousands of beings all symbiotically transforming and repurposing life. The word ‘things’ just doesn’t encompass this. They are certainly not my possessions. I own the box in the ground and I suppose I did order my first worms from a website. But they come and go as they please and I’m just grateful to take part in what they are already doing.
Song of the Cedars
This song is a glorious collaboration between humans and nature. It’s human collaborators are writer and lyricist Robert Macfarlane, field mycologist Giuliana Furci of the Fungi Foundation and the field lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito. It’s more-than-human collaborator is the Los Cedros cloud forest and it features sound recordings from toucan barbets , echo-locating bats, howler monkeys, crickets and rustling leaves. Most exciting for me in this context is that it features a subterranean recording of the soil taken from the exact location where a new species of fungus was collected and described.
The lyrics“Earth cover my limbs now, And mould thrive on my skin” particularly speak to me in this song and whilst listening I find myself easily imagining my own physical and spiritual being slipping into the earth, becoming part of the more-than-human expanse of ecology.
This song is particularly special as the human counterparts are seeking to legally petition to extend the forests already established legal personhood to give it moral authorship of the song. Though it will not receive royalties, any streaming generated income will be donated to the Lost Cedros Fund.
Roots
I volunteer at a wildflower nursery and every week I have the pleasure of assisting in the sowing and growing of wildflowers. Through potting on seedlings and plants whose roots have reached the capacity of their containers I have had opportunity to get a good look their root systems. It sounds a simple thing but I generally don’t get to see what’s going on with wildflower roots as, aside from any legalities, it mostly just doesn’t feel right to uproot them. Needless to say I have taken the opportunity to allow myself a good ogle and I became fascinated by the small nodules that can be found on the roots of plants within the pea family. This includes the likes of clovers, vetches, gorse, trefoils etc. These nodules are the result of a symbiosis between a nitrogen fixing bacteria and the plant. A mutually beneficial relationship and another fascinating function of a complex and intelligent system.
Underland
Rob Mcfarlane’s book ‘Underland’ open my mind to the subterranean. The deep-time dwelling bedrock that long predates the anthropocene and will far exceed our existence. It holds the histories of our world from before history was conceptualised. In deep time, It flows like rivers and tides.
“For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey
Becoming Earth
I am greedy for anything written or spoken by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I’m also an avid listener of Emergence Magazines Podcast series so I was thrilled to see an episode titled ‘Becoming Earth’ written and narrated by Kimmerer herself.
You can read and/or listen to the essay here.
Kimmer has a wonderful way of allowing the streams of science and spirituality to flow together. In this essay she explores ecology as experimental theology and presents soil as “both the cradle and the grave”. It introduced me to the abbreviation TNS to mean temporarily not soil as she remembers a beloved soil scientist and professor Dr Francis D. Hole who would place those letters after his name, preferring it I suppose to his many educational credentials. It also made me laugh at the irony of using the word ‘dirt’ in reference to “soil so clean and nourishing, you could eat it”.
Soil
Matthew Evans book, ‘Soil: The incredible story of what keeps the earth, and us, healthy’ is an expansive and deep dive into soil ecology. I would struggle to sum up this book or choose a single stand out quote because there is so much gold. Isabella Tree, author of Wilding describes it as ‘An exuberant, intelligent, mind-expanding hymn to the soil’ and I wouldn’t be able to describe it better than that!
One revelation from reading this one - Soil is an antidepressant. No really! A common soil bacterium M. vaccae has been shown to boost the levels of happy hormones, serotonin and norepinephrine and reduce stress. The best news is that the scientists reckon ingesting and breathing it is just as good as being injected with it. So grow your own veggies friends, and don’t wash them too well I guess! It fits with ‘the old friends’ hypothesis which asserts that this benefit is due to that fact we as humans co-evolved along with these microorganisms from the natural environment.
✦
This year I promised myself I would explore new processes and allow some time to deepen my connection to the living world and develop my creative practice along with that connection. This artwork has taken me outside of my usual methods. I have enjoyed exploring another print medium and stepping, just for a moment, away from of the time and labour intensive paper-making process. The posters created for this design have been riso printed using rice based inks on paper made entirely from post-consumer waste. There are some similarities to letterpress in the way that colours are layered and I still have a mind to one day bring this design to the old printing press on some special handmade paper, but for now I’m enjoying stretching my arms outside the limitations of my primary mediums.
If any of this has sparked excitement about soil let me know in the comments. But more importantly, go outside and smell the earth, get it under your fingernails, breathe in the microorganisms - They’re old friends after all!
