When all around us voices are raised in anger,
hatred spilling into the streets and sparking more hatred,
sometimes the best we can do
is to sink our hands into the soil.
Let the fights over abstractions ebb away, flow like water into the earth. Fill your fingers with dirt that is itself the product of rocks worn to powder over millennia, leavened with particles of other lives—
lives of leaves and vegetables and other animals, once as warm and active as you are now. Everything dies and returns to its source, breaks down into the ingredients of some new life: bits of humus, squirming bacteria, a tiny egg.
This is real: the sun warm on your back,
the soil cool under your bare feet,
a tiny new stem that will unfurl to grow a sweet red tomato,
and the hand of a friend gently helping you to rise.
Even on our most difficult days, we can touch the soil and be grateful for the earth and the love that sustain us.
