EMERSON WROTE THAT IF THERE WERE GOOD MEN, we would not go into such raptures over nature. He cited an old proverb, one I’ve never heard elsewhere: “When the king is in the palace, no one looks at the walls.”
By “king” he did not mean someone unknown to us. He meant himself and each one of us. After five years of work on the soil—looking at these “walls” for their beauty, usefulness, strength—I have come to the conclusion that I ought to start all over again. I ought to write about the man the soil suggests.
Hans Jenny is as close as I have found. He was a man of deep integrity. With seven decades of hard-won knowledge, he confessed his ignorance. He insisted on seeing whole, when others made a virtue of seeing in slices. He knew science as a form of prayer.
Even Hans is not enough, though. Each of us is made of Stardust, as my boss, Jim Morton, preaches every year. We have each, then, the stuff in us and the bound-up energy that might launch a beam of light.
Soil is only the darkest and coldest of all living things. The most widespread. And the most receptive. Warmed, it blooms. So may I in my darkest moments be attentive to the penetrating rays of the sun that finds the seed.
Work, motion, life. All rise from the dirt and stand upon it as on a launching pad. At the outer edge of the atmosphere, the thin air continually gives off hydrogen ions that join the solar wind. To what end and to what stars might this lightest, quickest dust be bound?