Soil
What are we rooting into?
When a dormant seed begins to sprout, the first part to emerge is not the tender shoot we see growing upward toward light. No, a seed knows that, without a sufficient anchor to support and hydrate it, that shoot will not have the strength to defy gravity and push up through the heavy universe of the soil to reach that light and begin to feed itself. That first primordial root, aptly called a radicle, swells out of the seed as it bursts open and stretches down into the earth, winding through crevices between tiny rock fragments and then intertwining with them to brace the tiny plant as it heaves itself up toward the sky.
A seed doesn’t sprout into a vacuum. That radicle pushes into a specific soil, in a specific place, at a particular moment in time. And at this moment in time, the humans who study soil are currently having their minds blown every single day as they discover more and more about the staggering diversity and complexity within healthy soils and the vital roles these soils can play in everything from reversing climate change to purifying water to boosting our immune systems. To understand soil in this way implies a responsibility to steward it in ways that are in direct opposition to business as usual, including the ways that we feed, clothe, heal, and shelter ourselves, organize our towns and cities, and relate with ourselves and one another.
“We have never known what we are doing, because we have never known what we are undoing.” -Wendell Berry
This little seed of a project is absolutely sprouting into a particular soil, in a particular place and time. This soil is rich with teachers who keep our spirits humble, our curiosity piqued, our imaginations active, and our perspectives engaged with appropriate timescales–intertwining the here and now with the distant and recent past and the possibilities embedded in every potential future. One of our main goals with this project is to connect our friends and comrades with the wisdom of these teachers, and to be introduced to new ones within this community of seekers and dreamers and noticers.
While there is no way we could provide an exhaustive list of all of the teachers and guides who have brought us to this point, here is a shorter list of the ones who continually come up in our conversations with each other, who are consistently nourishing us and expanding our thinking, creating an ever more fertile soil for all of us to root into and grow from. Each one has lifetimes of wisdom to offer, and we hope you enjoy digging in the soil of their ideas as well!
Seeds
Trees
Moss
Cacti
Tardigrades
Blaze and Ron (our beloved dogs who have since passed on)
Huckleberries
Garden soil
Mycelia
Snails
Great Salt Lake
Bumblebees
Payette Lake
The Boise River
The Sagebrush Steppe
The Moon
