The Disconnect

Today found me back in the dirt.  Maybe busting open furrows of dark dirt for planting potatoes served me like a jug of water priming a well.  Anyway, putting the push plow aside, I picked up a shovel to dig a couple of holes for some peach trees.  One of the thing that happened to me through the course of my working years was a disconnect from the earth.  Retirement and life on a farm set me to thinking about the earth in a new and different way.

 

I suppose it is truthful to simply say I did not think about the earth much at all.  Aside from giving the occasional lip service to taking care of the earth and choosing not to be a litter bug, I was largely unaware that the ground on which I walked was holy, created, and called good by the Creator.  And, it is also true that I lived without any real awareness that the Word of God called me a child born of dust who would return to dust.  What I heard and proclaimed on Ash Wednesday was mostly forgotten and ignored the rest of the time.

 

Our sanctuaries are filled with symbols made by human hands that point us toward the holy, but the earth under our feet was made by the hands of God and point us directly toward Him.  It has become impossible to walk the land, see the trees rising in the air, watching everything around me constantly changing according to a divine plan without realizing that sanctuaries are small holy places and the earth is holy for as far as the eye can see and even beyond.  I should take my shoes off more.  Maybe you should, too.