The Promise of Soil
200 Years of Optimism
As I was surveying today’s plantings in the field a short while ago, I was struck with a familiar feeling. A feeling I know well. A feeling that I believe every farmer who has worked this soil for last 200 years has felt.
The feeling of serene optimism. The feeling of hope, of promise. A feeling that eclipses all the outside world’s chaos. The soil that’s now home to these new lives has nurtured countless lives before and will nurture countless lives hereafter. The cycle is repetitive but always new and always exciting. My senses are euphoric, my being is alive.
I am reminded of a passage from “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture” by Wendell Berry:
“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.”