Soul and Soil

Welcome 2024 and a blast of fortifying cold winds and several inches of snow that has me attending more frequently to the wood stove fire. The logs that warmed me first as I gathered, bucked, split and stacked now warm again when burned, making their way back to elemental being. What a marvel.

Some wood sits in a heap, a trailer-load of cottonwood dumped this fall here by an Albuquerque tree removal service. This tree grew up and lived in Corrales in the Bosque, and it pains me to think it's no longer a living thing but wood "seasoning" before I burn it. Perhaps this is too melancholy a view? A perspective more maudlin than pragmatic? I'm guessing this is just my disposition and, always, keeping one eye on death, the eternal return, the changing of states for all matter.

In the John Burroughs book I'm reading, Leaf and Tendril, in an essay titled, "The Grist of the Gods," he writes, "All things are alike under the same laws--the rocks, the soil, the soul of man, the trees in the forest, the stars in the sky. . . . We hardly realize how life itself has stored up life in the soil, how the organic has wedded and blended with the inorganic in the ground we walk upon. . . . [M]uch of our soil has lived and died many times, and has been charged more and more during the geologic ages or eternities with the potencies of life."

Not too many years ago it was fashionable to think of ourselves as stardust. Another thought circulated in Sam Kean's Caesar's Last Breath, that Julius Caesar's last breath contained something like 25 sextillion air molecules and spread around the earth in such a way that now I (apparently) just had one molecule of Caesar's air in the breath I just breathed. Air, soil, soul, potent with life (and with the dead). All of geologic time, all of human civilization, all of all: the parts participating in the whole, the whole present in the parts. In light of this, what seems unnatural and devastating is to set the soul apart from or outside all this, to suppose an immaterial something that will forever be outside of this marvel, supernatural, a "soul" separated from life and all this potency and regeneration, just to preserve the I that is me.

My seeing is changed and charged by such thoughts, and my being, sometimes plagued by the morose and mortality, soothed. It's enough to be here now, to be one small iteration in this eternal all, to be, as Vonnegut so eloquently put it, lucky mud. What a marvel to be soul and soil, here and now.

The wind's been kicking the sandy soil about so the snow snagged some for itself.