Speak to the Earth and It Will Teach You

Job 12:7-8  “But ask the beasts and they will teach you, the birds of the heavens and they will tell you, or speak to the earth and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.”

  

It has been 4 years and 4 months since I left the city and the full spectrum of miracle grow products!  Little did I understand that I had been living a co-dependent relationship with my garden.  I supplied the drugs that kept it beautiful.  If I stopped the products of fertilizer ‘drugs’, the garden would die.  Year after year I would spend money on so many different chemicals to kill bugs and weeds, chemicals to grow the vegetation I wanted, and chemicals to keep it beautiful and free from pest.  Little did I understand that I had turned my soil into dead dirt that could no longer support any living vegetation without added chemicals.

Fusion of life  (Dirt to Soil, Gabe Brown, p. 48)

Ray Archuleta (who at the time worked for the USDA’s National Technology Center in North Carolina,) had an unexpected life changing experience while visiting the farm of Gabe Brown.  .  He saw and learned that soil is a living ecosystem and realized that nature is more collaborative than competitive.  This was a moment of conversion from all his training as a government agronomist.  And from this moment he came up with a catchphrase to describe the transformation of dirt into soil – Fusion of Life.   “Dirt becomes soil not simply because there is enough organic matter in the soil but because there’s life in the soil – and not just any life but the full spectrum of soil biology.”

This book, directed to my attention from a friend Jimbo, provided me with the words that joined my physical and spiritual world.  Fusion of life concept is a signpost from nature of the crucial nature of living in a society that incorporates a ‘full spectrum’ of peoples, ideas,  & spirituality.  Nature shows us that living in a monoculture does not support a healthy environment for plants.  And if we listen to the earth, then living in a monoculture is not a healthy environment for humanity.  

I was sitting in the waiting room getting my oil changed and I started a conversation with a farmer who was sitting across from me.  Here was a man whose family had lived in this area as farmers for several generations.  He spoke about how he had come to change the way he farmed and grazed his cattle - and how successful he had been after changing his old ways that are still practiced today with his neighbors.  He spoke about how his neighbors farming and grazing was not producing the outcome their needed, but still, in the light of his success, were not able to change the way things had always been....

This is my garden today.  We live on an organic farm - no pesticides, no chemicals.  My plants are raised from seed.  Now I know lots of people are doing this already, but this is magic to me.  I have learned to let weeds stay in the garden because of what they bring to the soil, I learned to fill my boxes with several different plants rather than one kind of plant per box, I learned that some weeds attract bugs away from the vegetation I plant, I learned not to turn my soil and disrupt the 'fusion of life' underneath that I will need for a healthy garden, and I learned that I have so far to go...I am a baby at this...

What lover is this that seduces me with the sweet scent of honeysuckle mingled with the background music of the woods?

What lover is this that shows me her frightening power of lightening and thunder; wind and water, which pushes aside all barriers, setup to control her.

What lover is this that makes me want to lie down in the field to be held by the sweet scent and comfort her arms give me?

She asks only that I know her, and from that knowing, respect all of her parts.  She is the full spectrum of life neither good, nor bad.  She lays out all of her parts for me to view her loveliness.