Dirt

You know, sometimes I think we really get what we need when we get it and sometimes I think we just know in our subconscious what we need and then we notice it.

I'm having one of those days, whichever way you play it.

Yesterday was so weird and overwhelming to me and yet, in some ways I will admit, gratifying. I had a lot of people come to my site. For me, anyway. I'm sure Pioneer Woman could put up a picture of her pinkie finger and get far more hits and far more comments but then she's Pioneer Woman and I am most definitely not. Besides, I can't make fun of her and her pictures of cows and beagles anymore because I seem to post a lot of pictures of chickens and they are just regular pictures while her cows look like God Himself is pointing a finger of light onto their beautiful cow coats of many colors and you can hear the angels singing in the background and I'm not kidding.

Anyway, back to today.
I woke up sore and feeling old, old, old. Really old. Went to yoga and realized that now it's not just my arms but my legs which are somehow covered in some old beige elephant's wrinkly hide and well, there you go. The truth is the truth.

But on my way in to the gated community where my yoga teacher lives (yes, I take yoga in the home of a person who lives in a gated community) and stopped to do the push pad to unlock the gate, this is what I saw:


No. Not a great picture but what a great moth. The Luna Moth. She is huge. And she is delicate and strong and a color of green that you dream of. See her feathery tail? From the side you notice how much they look like labia. Or at least I did. And I saw her and I got her picture with my phone and I am giving her to you. She made me stop and remember what it is in this world that makes me who I am, that gives me my breath and bones.

This real world, so full of miracles and madness.

And then on the way home, because as I drove I didn't even want to listen to NPR where they were talking about how poorly things are going in Afghanistan where Bush wanted to bomb them back into the stone age but he forgot they already ARE in the stone age, I listened to a CD called Mothers, Fathers, Uncles, Aunts by Garrison Keillor. It's all News From Lake Woebegon and to me that's sort of like eating only the insides of delicious chocolates but some days, the best will have to do, as my dear Norwegian friend Anne-Helene used to say when we ran out of margarine for baking and had to make do with real butter. And I sat in the driveway as he talked about what's real in this world and what isn't and he said something like this, "Forget everything you see on TV or hear on the radio or read in the paper or in a magazine and just go out in April and dig up a shovel full of dirt and look down into it because that's where it all begins."

And I know he's right.

I came in and got my camera and went outside and took some pictures of what grows in the dirt around my house. This dirt I curse when it drifts into the house and which I joyfully dig in when I'm working in my yard, black and thick and loamy which, when I pat the seeds into it, feels like bread dough or a baby's bottom.


Another not-good picture but that's my dirt, newly planted with the seeds of arugula and mustard greens and lettuces in rows so crooked that Mr. Moon could do nothing but laugh.

Here's the okra blooming that grows in my dirt and yes, I've already posted pictures of okra blooms this week but stop and look- see how they are related to the hibiscus and also the Confederate Rose which will be blooming here very soon beside the porch and they are also related to the Rose of Sharon and just think about how okra got here to this country from Africa. Which person had the wherewithal to smuggle the seeds of the okra here and which slaves convinced the white people to try them and do you think of them when you see okra? Do you eat okra? Do you cook it stewed with tomatoes or do you fry it up or do you throw it into your gumbo (and that word comes from the West African word for okra so don't even try to make gumbo without okra- don't think about it) and if you do cook it and eat it, did you know it started with that flower which is so enticing to bees and ants, too?


And I took pictures of my chickens because they love nothing more than to scratch in the dirt, searching for what we will never see, never even suspect is in there and they poop in the dirt and I rake it all up and take it out to my garden where that poop makes my soil, my dirt, so much richer, so much more productive, so much more capable of growing what I love to grow.

My sweet, funny chickens whom I would raise if they never laid me an egg, never gave me a thing for my garden. I like them that much. Every one of them different, Helen with her constant begging cluck, Red with her great jumping and precocious egg-laying abilities, Daffodil with her shyness, Sam with his manliness, Mable with her soft black feathers and her bitchy voice, Penny with her healed-over head, Elmira with her feathery legs.

And then I took a picture of my old boxer dog Pearl with her sweet gray muzzle, standing by the hurricane lilies which just spring forth from the plain old dirt, surprising me every year. I have never seen one of their bulbs that I know of, but they are there, hidden in the dirt all year until September when they suddenly shoot up and open into something looking like red gazebos if red gazebos were designed by mad Oriental Dahli's, too crazy to believe.


Keillor is right, of course. It all starts with the dirt. It all comes from the dirt. And the light and the water. One of my main holy trinities. Dirt, light, water. From these spring life which I am humbled and honored to tend here in the little plot of it I get to live on.

And so today, this day of my life which is the only one of this particular light and color and shade and sound I'll ever, ever have, I am thinking about dirt and life.

Because Lily's baby is due in six days the thought of life fills me up and makes me tremble every moment. The day is coming very soon when I will see her holding her child. A new life.
Can you imagine how that thought makes me feel if the okra blossoms fill my head with such big thoughts, with such gratefulness, with such amazement?

Yes. The world is a crazy place and filled with a lot of crazy people but right now, this minute, today, I am not thinking about them at all. I am thinking of life. I may spend my day working in the dirt outside or I may spend it cleaning the dirt from inside but either way, it's a day I want to remember, to honor.

This plain day.
Plain as dirt.
As filled with life.

I want to be like the chickens and scratch all the secret goodness out of it. The day AND the dirt.

Today feels like holy times. The craziness is still there, and it always will be. So will the holy.
Today I'm noticing that.
Today I'm reminding myself of that.

The holiness of dirt where it all begins and ends too, which is so very fine with me.