Day 14: Soil
When I was four years old my dad borrowed a bunch of money and bought a plot of land in the jungle a few miles from the ocean.
I spent a lot of time there growing up.
It wasn’t fancy. We slept in plywood shacks with corrugated metal roofs. We showered and used the toilet outdoors. Candles gave us light to read by at night, not electricity.
And the jungle never stopped growing. So every day we were there, we spent part of it clearing trail, hacking at vines and overgrown brush, and hauling load after load of soggy wet cuttings to the compost pile.
For an 8 year old, cutting down a full grown, 15 foot tall banana tree, then carrying its dripping sticky trunk across an acre of mud and lava rock is a special kind of torture.
But after a hard day’s work, there’s nowhere I’d rather be.
In a place like that, it’s easy to appreciate the simple things.
Going to sleep and waking up with the sun. A freshly picked avocado. The daily symphonies of happy birds and bees. Listening to waves crash under the full moon. Sitting around a campfire for hours into the night.
The summer before college I helped my dad build a real house on that property. I spent a few weeks out there alone. And they were some of the most peaceful and luxurious weeks of my entire life.
I remember deciding to start a garden behind the shack where I was staying. One evening in particular stands out.
As the sun was setting, it sent rays of golden light shooting through the trees around me, casting an orange glow on every trunk, leaf, rock, and blade of grass.
My jeans were mud stained and ragged. I was barefoot. Ind in the last bit of light I was breaking up the soil so I could plant seeds in the morning.
I knelt in the dirt to pick out loose stones and bits of wood. The earth was warm and fragrant. The only sounds were my breath and the birds.
Sitting there with my hands and feet in the soil, I have never felt richer.
In my life since then I’ve gotten caught up chasing money and status and respect and security.
But underneath all that, if you really boil it down, all I really want is the sense of peace I felt that day in the garden.
The rest just gets in the way.