The Dirt Under Our Feet

 

One of the things that has stayed with me from my contact with Guru Nitya is that each of us has a responsibility to find and cultivate our natural talents and interests in life. Discovering what we are born for contributes to our living a happier, more fulfilling life, and brings benefit to the community and society we live in.

 

I have been blessed with a strong spiritual and ecological connection with the life of the land. From a young age, I've felt love and awe for the beauty of the world. I was lucky to have parents who appreciated nature and to have grown up in the San Francisco Bay area. This love for life and landscape was further encouraged through my discipleship under Guru Nitya. As a teenager, Guru, then "Swami Nitya," instructed me to meditate on the various forms of the good Earth and see the motherly ways that it nurtures and supports life out of its dust, rocks, clouds, and oceans. Meditation on nature has continued throughout my life, helping me develop an intimacy and identity with it. I grew to feel the earth and the cosmos as my own body, a million-marvel-a-minute display of unitive divinity. What mattered was learning to treat "matter" as if it mattered. With love. With respect. With kinship.

 

I got to put my hands in the soil and learn to use garden tools by observing and working side-by-side with my Mom and Dad, both of whom were excellent gardeners. I learned that this kind of work gave me pleasure. I came to see that every task was an opportunity to enhance the aesthetics and vitality of my home and surroundings. Landscaping was empowering. As I matured, I saw that evolving a renewed, ecological sensibility and an unlimited sense of responsibility to humanity, and to life in every shape, size, and form with my fellow humans would flow from genuine understanding and spirituality.

 

Having grown up as I did, it is not surprising that I developed an abiding interest in recognizing the importance of soil health. This interest over time has turned into something of a talent. I learned that soil has "life" in it, microbial, organic, and energetic. It's literally in our hands to take care of. Soil health is a key element in an integrative vision of a healthy watershed, healthy food production, and a healthy ecosystem. Our survival as a species and that of other life forms that we share this planet with depends on caring for the health of the land, beginning with its soil.

 

My first soil health and compost teachers were trees. I watched them grow out of the ground, and whether deciduous or perennial, would drop at least some of their leaves or needles out to the edge of their canopy each year. The forces of heat and cold, drying and wetting, nibbling, and cracking, break down those layers of leaves and needles that lie like a blanket around trees and decompose further as their nutrients are incorporated into the soil, which are then available to benefit the tree and its neighbors through their root systems and fungal networks.

 

This additive process of tree debris to the soil has been going on for millions of years. Soil is basically an accumulation of decomposed minerals, plants, insects, micro-organisms, animals, and humans. This sum is what we call the "dirt under our feet," under our home foundations, sidewalks, streets, lakes, rivers, and streams.

 

Smart gardeners mimic what trees do naturally when they make compost and add it back into the soil as an amendment and around existing plantings. A top dressing of compost protects against soil erosion, moderates the extremes of temperature for the plant, conserves moisture by reducing the rate of evaporation, and shelters beneficial soil insects. Digging compost into the dirt adds organic, material and micro-organisms, improves soil's tilth (texture), aerates it, and increases moisture retention.

 

My Dad was my second, soil health, compost teacher. I saw him on occasion dig holes in flower beds and bury grass clippings in them to add tilth and nutrients to the soil.

 

In 1986, I moved to Salinas, California to teach at a very large elementary school after living and teaching for four years in Nevada. In Salinas, I met my third compost teacher. That teacher lived at the bottom of the three, grey, heavy-duty, plastic garbage barrels that lined the middle of our school cafeteria where school breakfasts and lunches were served to about a thousand, K-6 students a day. I was aghast when I first passed those barrels while bringing my class to sit for lunch. In those waste barrels I found pounds of food and milk waste, aluminum, plastic, condiments, and cutlery/napkin packs destined for the dumpster, and then the landfill. Something was profoundly amiss and had to change.

 

I almost immediately set up aluminum recycling at the school. Pretty soon after I also committed to set up a large-scale, food waste recycling program on vacant, district-owned land next door to deal with the food solids and milk that the kids at our school were tossing out. With lots of student help and staff and administrative buy-in, we soon were composting an average of one-thousand pounds of food waste a week using cover material from the stables of the Salinas Rodeo grounds and truckloads of wood chips and shredded material provided by the City of Salinas Forestry Department. While on our radar from the beginning, it took years of consciousness-raising and advocacy in our school district to create more fresh, appetizing school lunches better suited to the nutritional and cultural preferences of our school population.

 

Here in the last phase of my life, I still take pleasure in making beneficial compost to build soil health out of discarded food scraps, green waste, and animal manures. Diverting these materials from our municipal waste stream and from a fateful, wasteful dumping in a landfill, provides economic savings as well as ecological advantages. It’s a chance to see value in what others treat as valueless, turn the putrid into the pure, and the undesirable into the desirable. It gives me great satisfaction when I make these kinds of efforts for the earth's well-being, especially so, when working together with others. We learn to work together, and we learn how capable we can be.

 

I used to teach composting to students, teachers, and members of my community when I was younger; nowadays, this sharing is informal with people I meet, or who are sent to me, keen on growing healthier food by enlivening the worn-out dirt in their gardens or on their farms. Here is a photo taken in April of 2024 of finished compost that I helped make on land next door to the Sonoma Ashram in Sonoma, California:​​​​​​​​