Spring is coming as “the hand of winter gives up its grip to the sun.” I need to get my hands in the soil and touch the earth, to remember that I am made of earth and one day will return to it. I sit on the ground. It smells so wet and rich!

The trees are barely budding but I feel their “history of leaves.” I feel plants growing and with the earth tremble at the “birth of what is innocent and green.” I gather soil in my hands and marvel that it contains so many births, so many deaths, and one day mine.

The earth is waking up. The grasses and trees are waking up. I’m waking, too, feeling growth in the earth around me and in my soul, the deepest part of me, the earth’s flow of “life born of ancient death,” the death of stems and leaves, blossoms and bones, and my own dyings, losses, griefs.

“Life born of ancient death.” I remember that I am made of earth and one day will return to it. I remember: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single grain. But if it dies, it bears a rich harvest.” I take off my shoes and walk with bare feet on the sacred cool earth. I gather soil in my hands again and smudge some on my forehead, like ashes on the first day of Lent.

I remember that I am made of earth and one day will return to it. I remember the “birth of what is innocent and green.” And I give thanks for my living and my dying: “How sweet is the season of my time.” How sweet is the season of my time!

Intimacy with the Earth

The late Nancy Wood inspired me to write this meditation. In 1986 she gave us her book of poetry, Many Winters, on a visit to our Colorado monastery. Ever since then, on Ash Wednesday, I’ve often read her poem about the Taos Pueblo elder who puts a branch between his teeth at the coming of spring and covers himself with earth. The poem connects me to Chief Luther Standing Bear and his description of why Dakota people love to sit on the ground:

The old people literally loved the soil. When they sat or reclined on the ground, they had a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth, and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth…. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing. That’s why the old [people] still sit upon the earth instead of propping themselves up and away from its life-giving forces. For them to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply, to feel more keenly, to see more clearly into the mysteries of life.

At the coming of spring, the old Pueblo man covers himself with earth, the Dakota sit on the ground, and Christians blacken their foreheads with ash. In each instance, intimacy with the earth is the meaning of the act, although we Christians tend to emphasize the penitential meaning of Lent. I love the earth-meaning.

Job on the Dung Heap

The word “Lent” is derived from an old English word which means “spring,” or more literally, “lengthening of days.” We read from the Book of Job during this season. Job can sound pretty grim – unless you love worms and soil and dung heaps the way I do! I’ve shoveled a lot of manure in my day and must tell you there’s a lot of wisdom in it! (I’ve hauled all kinds in my wheelbarrow: cow, horse, chicken, pig. Horse smells the best and pig the worst, but not as bad as rotting seaweed!)

What does this have to do with my contemplative life? A lot, because everything connects, and the inner and outer are one. Job sits on a dung heap and reflects on the human condition. “I am leveled with the dust and ashes…. cast into the mire,” he moans. I am “like a flower that blossoms and withers” and “wastes away like a rotten thing.” Job goes on to call himself a maggot and a worm. His outlook on life echoes Psalm 22 which we pray on Good Friday, the day Jesus died: “… to the dust of death you have brought me down…. I am a worm, not a man.”

Worm or Human?

This language intrigues me, as it did St. Teresa of Avila, who frequently references “worminess” in her writings. In The Interior Castle, Teresa calls humanity an ugly worm (5:2:7), a foul-smelling worm (1:1:3), and a worm with such limited powers that we cannot understand the grandeurs of God (6:47). She seems to have had a highly refined olfactory sense experience of God whom she often found fragrant and sweet-smelling.

Her visions of hell and sin, however, were foul-smelling and malodorous. In her Way of Perfection, she even thanked God for the “bad odor He must endure” in allowing her to get near him! This is the same mystical sensitivity that led the author of the Cloud of Unknowing to call himself “a stinking lump of sin” and a humble little boy in our own era to pray, “O Lord, my name is mud!” (When you were young and naughty, did your mom tell you, ”If you don’t [insert anything here!], your name will be mud”?)

As she uses worm imagery, Teresa is not a very good naturalist, since worms are not usually smelly! And why is she so negative about them? Those of us who garden or compost know how valuable worms can be. I read somewhere that there are 50,000 earthworms in each acre of land. That many worms annually bring 36,000 pounds of subsoil to the surface as worm castings on each acre. Within twenty years, these castings add three inches of new soil to that same acre of earth. Facts like these make me glad to be called a worm!

The Wild World of Compost

Lent also sends me to the compost pile for inspiration. I’ve made a lot of compost in my life and treasure an old article from National Geographic titled “The Wild World of Compost.” The author is a professor of natural history who writes like a poet, seeing with his contemplative inner eye as well as his scientific outer eye.

He knows, like the Pueblo and the Dakota, that compost, like Lent and spring, “contains all previous births and deaths.” Watching a millipede crawl slowly over decaying humus is like “watching a symphony in movement.” He sees sow bugs as “gray galleons,” springtails as “jumping jacks,” and worms as “silent, subterranean contractors… the unsung heroes of the world beneath our feet.” (Ah, accolades for the worm at last!)

He is as enchanted by the earthly alchemy of compost as Walt Whitman, whom he quotes: “Behold this compost! Behold it well!… It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions.” As Job observed on his dung heap, “I must call corruption ‘my father’ and the maggot ‘my mother.’” According to English writer Hugh L’Anson Fausset, the way growth depends on decomposition in “the physical world” relates intimately to “the processes of the spiritual world.” For “the more we study the chemistry of the body, the more kindred it appears to the chemistry of the soul.” Everything connects, and the inner and outer are one.

Alchemy in the Human Heart

The more I study the alchemy of the compost pile and the dung heap, the springtime alchemy of the earth, the more I understand the alchemy in my own heart and soul. The biblical word for this is metanoia, a radical change of mind and heart. This is the whole meaning of Lent. The prophet Joel urges me to turn to God with all my heart. Psalm 51 tells me to offer God a humble and contrite heart.

What does it mean to be humble of heart? It means to understand myself as something of a worm, a piece of dung, or part of the compost pile, to understand that I die many times and in many ways before the great big death at the end of my life: to make humus in my soul and in the world, to make rich, dark, fertile soil that flowers and grows with “life born of ancient death.” The very word “humility” comes from the Latin word humus.

As Blaise Pascal said long ago, “We were lost and saved in a garden.” From the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve to the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus agonized the night before he died. It’s good to spend time in the garden during Lent. To work in the soil. Shovel some manure. Dig in the compost pile. Find some worms. Get dirt-y. And remember that we are made of earth and one day will return to it. But until then, “How sweet is the season of our time.” How sweet is the season of our time!

The photo of me turning the compost comes from the “old days” at our Nova Nada Hermitage in Nova Scotia, Canada. Quotations in the meditation and following, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from Nancy Wood’s Many Winters, published by Doubleday in 1974.