Soil Practice

Elemental prompts for ritual and reflection

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About The Practices

Previous practices: Water Practice

I was the kind of child who hated getting dirt under their fingernails. It’s not that I was particularly fastidious or feminine; I just always hated the texture of soil, the damp grittiness that pressed against your nailbed until you could scrub it away.

We are told now that contact with soil diversifies our gut bacteria, improving our immune system and preventing allergies. At the time, it was all just dirt: wet, it splashed up my legs as I rode my bike. Dry, it took on the horrifying texture of sand. It seemed best to avoid it.

These days, a sickle of mud under my nails is evidence of a day well spent. I love to get my hands in soil. I’ve spent years digging organic matter into my garden, opening up the heavy clay, making space for a battalion of fat pink worms. I’m missing the early season planting this year, the way the soil still feels cold below the surface, the way it warms as the season goes on. It feels like a loss.

Soil is more than dirt: it is identity. Soil is the food that we know best, the scent of each season, the ground beneath our feet. It is our own, personal terroir, a connection we forge in infanthood, when we are close to the ground. Many of us become disconnected from our soil as we get older, scolded for ruining our clothes, diverted to more worldly concerns (though what would be more worldly than the stuff our planet is made from?), housed in places where the soil is beyond our reach. Some will spend a lifetime rebuilding this fundamental relationship, this mother-bond. Others will never realise how much it matters.

To be humble is to literally be ‘of the soil’, and we are all humbled eventually. Wisdom lies in those who choose their humbling.

Soil Practice