# 239: Cultivating the Soil
Story behind the Passage
I just finished mowing 600 square meters of wilderness. It was the first time that I mowed this year and it was definitely too late. But now I did it and I feel happy. I feel happy in the way that you only feel happy when you work with the earth; cultivating it, growing vegetables, building things on it. I know it is a great privilege to even have your own soil to cultivate, even if it might be just a small compartment. I just saw a report a few weeks ago that showed how long people in the city have to be on a waiting list to get a small garden plot.
This trend towards nature is somehow silly, somehow sad, somehow quite nice. It reminds me of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (but I think I already blogged about him, right?).
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” — Thoreau
Urban people nowadays also want to discover this kind of life, I guess. They want to live “deliberately.” I also think they are not only looking for peace and plants, they are looking for themselves in some way. This might be my interpretation, I do not know. I just know that if I lived in the city, I would lose myself. Well, that is not correct. You cannot actually lose yourself because of some circumstances but you can live in conditions which make it more difficult to stay grounded. There are conditions which simply do not correspond to your nature. So, my deep connection to the earth is something that ties me to nature. And now that I am done with my little farming exercise for today, I have to write about Crèvecoeur.
The passage above is not the most famous one from the book, as you might know. I will give the most well-known one at the end of this post because I still want to show it, even though I do not focus on it. It is just as crucial as what I am writing here about the first one. I think, in the U.S., people still have a different relationship with the soil. That does not apply to people in the city, maybe, but maybe it does. Even people in the city usually drive long distances and if you drive for a while in the U.S., you see a lot of untouched nature. Or maybe I am just romanticizing my personal memories, I do not know. What I know is that the cultivation of the soil was obviously tied to nation building. When the settlers came to the New World, this was the only way they could start a new life. They had to build a house, grow food, live their life, build communities. Whenever I think of this, I feel quite warm inside. There is something amazing about finding a piece of land and building a life on it.
My Learnings
“Men are like plants.” There is not much more to add, actually.
We are born,
we live,
we flourish,
we endure,
we whither,
we die.
What makes all the difference, though, is the soil we grow on and the changes we undergo. Yes, there is some topsoil, humus, that we get planted on. And it makes a difference whether this topsoil is full of nutrients and irrigation. But just like we change in the course of life, the soil also gets renewed. It might be that we as the plant cannnot move anywhere else. But the soil keeps changing and so do we. We might still have traces of the original humus but everything that happens then — the seasons, the sun, the rain, and the wind — all this will have an impact on us — the plant — and on the earth that we grow on.
When I work outside with my bare hands, I smell the earth, I feel the sun on my skin, and I also feel the thorns and the burn of the stinging nettle, just like I feel and smell the wet grass. Every hour you spend working the soil is an hour that connects you with nature and everything that nature stands for. For me, this is where I feel at home. I feel my body and I feel alive. While I do what I do when I work the soil, I often think of the farmers of long-gone ages. I know that farm work for earning a living and farm work for fun are two different things. Farm work itself has nothing to do with gardening, or very little, at least. Still, what remains is the deep connection to the earth. And I think, as soon as a society completely forgets about this connection, a piece of humanism is also lost.
When I think of the early days of the U.S., I also think of the spirit that shaped the culture forever after. This is true for humans as plants as well. Yes, we are all shaped by he soil that gave birth to us. In many phases of our lives, we might curse this soil and the troublesome fears and habits it might have equipped us with. But if you live according to the rules of nature and in peace with universal rules, then you also know that there is no reason to be mad or sad about this. Just think of the flower again. The flower does not worry about being someone else. Neither does the flower curse the soil she stands on. It is just very clear that every flower grows on a particular soil. Otherwise, it would not exist in the first place. No matter how often we run the risk of hating ourselves because we hate the soil that our seed was planted in, everything is just right the way it is. Just think of Thich Nhat Hanh’s words:
“There is the mud and there is the lotus that grown out of the mud. We need the mud in order to make the lotus.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
Reflection Questions
1) Which activities connect you to the earth?
2) What is the topsoil that you were planted on? In how far does this humus still nourish your roots?
3) What do you think about this last passage in which Crèvecoeur describes the identity of the American as a “new man”? In how far are the U.S. different from other countries, also with respect to their relation to nature?