To dig a hole

Breaking new ground is the hardest thing to do. You’d resolved to simply dig a hole. Easy-peasy. A small incision on your patch to bless with the tree you’d reared for four years in a pot. Winter is coming and deciduous trees like a little sleep before summer thumps again. You find soil in years of solitude is unwilling to be examined. Roots collide with everything subterranean.

“They run in astonishing tangles, braided like stockwhips each one as thick and each one as instructive. ”

With each strike comes the clean, primitively-binding smell of dirt. Trillions of aerosoled soil-borne bacteria and fungi, freshly ground, filling your airways. You remember reading recently about the human microbiome and that you are an extension of the soil. You are in effect a walking #garden. Succulent worms scatter riding the fibrous networks impossible for you or I to pursue. The mattock makes clumsy work of worms and roots. They are limber and filled with that elastic resilience nature makes a living from. You are out of economy, out of breath, fly-blown and the hole? It is but a smirk on the landscape.