[Preliminary Thoughts: IV]
“Soiled” means to be dirty or stained. In a metaphorical sense it means to be stigmatized or disgraced. It’s a term with only negative meaning.
But soil is not bad! To live on a farm is fundamentally to interact with soil. It’s quite literally the beating heart of every agricultural endeavor. A lesson learned quickly from farm life is that when it comes to food (agriculture), we the soiled ones, are only one step closer to the dirt than the patrons of the grocery store. That being said, we can remove the preposition “on the farm” from the first sentence, and it remains true: to live is to fundamentally interact with soil.
And yet it carries such negative meaning in our overly sanitized culture. Cleanliness is a virtue (and it’s next to godliness, as the saying goes) is it not? So, it’s not just semantics to wrestle with the use (and abuse) of the term soil, it matters to how we perceive others, how we understand and practice religion, and how we interact with our physical surroundings.
Soil is good. And that apple in your fruit basket is “built” by it.
Yet we understand it as contaminated and bad.
I look forward to exploring this disparity further.
