Soil and Saber-Toothed Cats

"Only then will we realize that we are just as vulnerable as the soil, the mammoth, the saber-toothed cat, and the bison."

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A Floral Phalanx and An Evening Journey

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Photo by Robert Clark: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-blurry-photo-of-a-building-in-the-grass-26613705

Soil and Saber-Toothed Cats

Harmony is combined self-expression adorning one, great melody. So it is also with Creator and their climate.

We are approaching a colossal collapse, I believe, and we have some decisions to make. Since the early twentieth century, the human population has quadrupled and its environmental load has increased more than forty-fold. What we experienced during the COVID-19 era illustrated, regardless of how you fall on the particulars, Rebecca Costa’s “cognitive threshold” for human problem solving. We ran this way and then we ran that. We jumped higher and fell flatter. Ecologically, we are steadily degrading our biosphere with industry and green energy projects that attempt to heal it.¹ Agriculturally, we are steadily building our soils by creating pastured CAFOs of mobbing herbivores who are subservient to our will and slaves to our desires.

Kincentric rewilding is not equivalent to the essence of the wild. Plenty of books about rewilding and relearning to live a wild life occupy the best-selling bookshelf ends in large bookstores and live long atop Amazon’s algorithmically curated lists of recommendations. But they talk about the wild as a thing, over there, with an essence living in its thingness. “We must learn to become wild once again,” they write as though “the wild” is clothing that we can don if we want to. If we just try hard enough.

But we will never experience her ultimate expression so long as we merely conceive and push forward her idea, put up with her as a practice that some implement around us, or evade her entirely. As long as we remain tethered to her in some abstract form, her essence remains locked away from us. “Names can name no lasting name,” the great Taoist master wrote and the essence of something is held not in what it encompasses, but in what allows it to encompass anything at all.

Life is not what we see, but what holds our sight holds our life.

This is in the same way with soil. The purely accurate is not yet the true. Truth seeks true relations and it is out of this pure relationship that material and essence and creation work together to construct what is accurately and commonly known as the truth. Soil health and the many modern movements that have been constructed around the soil’s suspected importance in regard to the healthy future of mankind (it is always in regard to mankind’s future) is something that appears purely accurate to us but it is not yet something that is true.