Dirt and Worms

Few things are as beautiful and the black, loamy, worm-rich soil I shoveled out of my compost heap last Saturday.   Turning those rich, black shovelfuls into the hard, dry planting rows of our garden I felt something of the agricultural strains of my ancestry playing through my veins -  a unique mix of hope, sweat, purpose and a belonging to the land that belongs to me.


Next to great dirt, my favorite part of composting is a two line sentence I stumbled across at the end of a book on composting which I got at a yard sale for a quarter.  After chapters upon chapters on chemical decomposition, directions for aeration, recipes for getting dirt in 2 weeks, 6 weeks or 8 weeks, the author concluded with the thought "Dirt happens."  He expanded that thought by saying that if you just leave your leaves and grass clippings long enough, dirt will happen.  I liked that.  We give ours two years.


For me, much of life is like that.  Put the right ingredients together, give it time and good things will happen.  True, there are some parts of my life where I have the expertise to balance diverse variables in an equation of elegant complexity.  But those areas are few and far between.  In most of the areas of my life I create a pile of good intentions, good ideas, a few goals and as much work I can squeeze into a day and I watch to see what happens.  It is amazing what good results bloom up out in that kind of soil.


Once, a man was complimenting my grandfather on his full life and large posterity, and rather fatuously asked "How ever did you do it?"  To which my grandfather replied, "Clean living."  Now, anyone who knows my grandfather, knows that statement to be full of the wry, intentionally simplistic humor that comes so readily to a well read man like himself.  But under that snappy come-back is a great deal of truth.  A life of clean living can bloom out in surprising and wonderful ways.


The point?  Life is often less complex than we give it credit for.   Like composting, if you put good things in and give it time, good things will come out.

The world is won by those who let it go.
~Lao Tzu