Monthly Archives: April 2007

dirty is good

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At least that’s what a new research report says, according to here:

Victims of depression could benefit from a down-to-earth approach … getting dirty.

Apparently the ‘friendly’ bacteria in soil can be as uplifting as anti-depressant drugs. Mice treated with the bacteria appeared more relaxed. It stimulated the immune system and activated brain neurons producing the mood-enhancing chemical seratonin, a study has shown.

One expert said research involving mycobacterium vaccae ‘leaves us wondering if we shouldn’t all spend more time playing in the dirt’.

No wonder kids love playing in the dirt. No wonder I love to mix potting soil and plant seeds.
This time of year you can start to smell the dirt. Spring mudluscious dirt.
This poem, by Marge Piercy

The Common Living Dirt
Marge Piercy

The small ears prick on the bushes,
furry buds, shoots tender and pale.
The swamp maples blow scarlet.
Color teases the corner of the eye,
delicate gold, chartreuse, crimson,
mauve speckled, just dashed on.

The soil stretches naked. All winter
hidden under the down comforter of snow,
delicious now, rich in the hand
as chocolate cake: the fragrant busy
soil the worm passes through her gut
and the beetle swims in like a lake.

As I kneel to put the seeds in,
careful as stitching, I am in love.
You are the bed we all sleep on.
You are the food we eat, the food
we are, the food we will become.
We are walking trees rooted in you.

You can live thousands of years
undressing in the spring your black
body, your red body, your brown body
penetrated by the rain. Here
is the goddess unveiled,
the earth opening her strong thighs.

Yet you grow exhausted with bearing
too much, too soon, too often, just
as a woman wears through like an old rug.
We have contempt for what we spring
from. Dirt, we say, you’re dirt
as if we were not all your children.

We have lost the simplest gratitude.
We lack the knowledge we sowed ten
thousand years past, that you live
a goddess but mortal, that what we take
must be returned; that the poison we drop
in you will stunt our children’s growth.

Tending a plot of your flesh binds
me as nothing ever could to the seasons,
to the will of the plants, clamorous
in their green tenderness. What
calls louder than the cry of a field
of corn ready, or trees of ripe peaches?

I worship on my knees, laying
the seeds in you, that worship rooted
in need, in hunger, in kinship,
flesh of the planet with my own flesh,
a ritual of compost, a litany of manure.
My garden’s a chapel, but a meadow

gone wild in grass and flower
is a cathedral. How you seethe
with little quick ones, vole, field
mouse, shrew and mole in their thousands,
rabbit and woodchuck. In you rest
the jewels of the genes wrapped in seed.

Power warps because it involves joy
in domination; also because it means
forgetting how we too starve, break,
like a corn stalk in the wind, how we
die like the spinach of drought,
how what slays the vole slays us.

Because you can die of overwork, because
you can die of the fire that melts
rock, because you can die of the poison
that kills the beetle and the slug,
we must come again to worship you
on our knees, the common living dirt.

seeding is believing

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I know it’s early in the season, but there’s something in me that needs to plant seeds. Seeds mean hope — hope for beauty, hope for nourishment, hope for miracles.
During the winter, I ordered dozens of packages of seeds — flowers I’ve never seen before, Monkey Flowers, Balloon Flowers, also Chinese Lanterns, exotic lilies….– and tomatoes and herbs and yellow cauliflower and…
Three days ago, I stayed up late and mixed the seed-starter soil. Over the past two days I spent my mother’s nap times planting the seeds in little peat pots. Tonight, they are all warm and moist in the grow-lit confines of a portable greenhouse that I have wedged in a space near my bathroom — the only space available.
I harvested hundreds of marigold seeds and dozens of decorative hot pepper seeds from last year’s plants. When it’s warmer, I wiil plant them in pots that can sit indoors under the windows until outdoor planting time.
Today, I noticed that the squirrels had again chewed off the buds from the newly sprouted daffodils. I dumped a whole bottle of cayenne pepper over the ones that had survived. Supposedly squirrels don’t like hot peppers. Mixing them in the bird food didn’t stop them from getting into the feeders, however.
I did buy packs of coyote urine to keep the deer away. I put one by the budding flowers, but somehow I don’t think squirrels are afraid of coyotes.
My tiny lilac bushes that I planted last year have buds. Little miracles.
Every time I look at my grandson, I am struck by that miracle. That little seed that is now growing like a weed.
Oh, I don’t believe in miracles in the religious sense. Nature is the miracle.
Of course, now there’s the nun who says that the previous Pope should be canonized a saint because praying to him cured her of Parkinson’s disease. Her story is compelling. Nature works in mysterious ways.
Seeds. Seeds of thought. Seeds of hope. Seeds of belief.
So much depends upon seeds.