[Soil & Land - I]
“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. Soil is quite literally the beating heart of every agricultural endeavor. I’ve grown to cherish soil, especially when it is fertile, balanced, and has good tilth.
And yet it carries such negative meaning in our overly sanitized culture.
Cleanliness is a virtue, is it not? Cleanliness is next to godliness, as the saying goes. So, to wrestle with the concept of soil is not just semantics. How we understand and interact with soil/soiled and dirt/dirty matter to how we perceive others, how we understand and practice “godliness,” and how we interact with our physical surroundings..
Soil is good. Yet we understand it as contaminated and bad.
For the next few weeks I’d like to return to the soil (and land), dig around a bit, and see what meaning we can learn from it.
